Theory and History of Literature

Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse

Volume 45. Manfred Frank What Is Neostructuralism?
Volume 44. Daniel Cottom Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and
Literary Representation
Volume 43. Michael Nerlich The Ideology of Adventure, Volume 2
Volume 42. Michael Nerlich The Ideology of Adventure, Volume I
Volume 41. Denis Hollier The College of Sociology
Volume 40. Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason
Volume 39. Gza von Molnar Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and
Artistic Autonomy
Volume 38. Algirdas Julien Greimas On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semi-
otic Theory
Volume 37. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok The Wolf Mans Magic Word:
A Cryptonymy
Volume 36. Alice Yaeger Kaplan Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Litera-
ture , and French Intellectual Life
Volume 35. Denis Hollier The Politics of Prose
Volume 34. Geoffrey Hartman The Unremarkable Wordsworth
Volume 33. Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory
Volume 32. Djelal Kadir Questing Fictions: Latin Americas Family Romance
Volume 31. Samuel Weber Institution and Interpretation
Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature
Volume 29. Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama
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Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and
Modernism
Volume 26. Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation: Hlderlin, Hegel,
Heidegger
Volume 25. Jos Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a
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Volume 24. Hlne Cixous and Catherine Clment The Newly Born Woman
Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, 2. Male Bodies: Psychoana-
lyzing the White Terror
Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, L Women, Floods, Bodies,
History
Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem
Volume 20. Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thbaud Just Gaming
For other hooks in the series, see p. 483
What Is
Neostructuralism?
Manfred Frank
Translation by Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray
Foreword by Martin Schwab
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 45
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Copyright 1989 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Originally published as Was ist Neostrukturalismus? 1984 by Suhr-
kamp, Frankfurt.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55414.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frank, Manfred.
What is neostructuralism?
(Theory and history of literature ; v. 45)
Translation of: Was ist Neostrukturalismus?
Includes index.
1. Structuralism. I. Title. II. Series.
B841.4.F7413 1988 149'.96 87-26689
ISBN 0-8166-1599-3
ISBN 0-8166-1602-7 (pbk.)
Permission to quote selected passages from the following is gratefully ac-
knowledged: The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault, trans-
lated by A. M. Sheridan-Smith, 1972. Reprinted by permission of Irving-
ton Publishers, New York. Copyright Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1972.
Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure, translated by
WadeBaskin. Reprinted by permission of the Philosophical Library. Copy-
right 1959. Dissemination by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara
Johnson. Reprinted by permission of The Athlone Press Ltd. and The
University of Chicago Press. Copyright The University of Chicago
Press, 1981. crits: A Selection by Jacques Lacan. Translated by Alan
Sheridan from the French. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com-
pany, Inc. Copyright 1977 Tavistock Publications Limited. "Introduc-
tion to the Origin of Geometry" by Jacques Derrida from Edmund HusserPs
Origin of Geometry, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Nicolas-Hays, York Beach, ME. Copyright Nicolas-Hays,
1978. "Limited Inc abc. . . ." by Jacques Derrida, from Samuel Weber
Additional copyright information p. 484
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
Contents
Foreword Martin Schwab x
Translators' Note xlv
Abbreviations xlvii
LECTURE 1. General introduction into the impulses behind contemporary Ger-
man and French philosophy. Personal interest in the subject matter and aim of
the lectures. First steps in introducing neostructuralism. The "critique of
metaphysics." The general organization of the lectures: I. Attempt at a general
definition of "neostructuralism"; II. Three questions addressed to neostructural-
ism from the perspective of hermeneutics: (1) Where does neostructuralism stand
with regard to the phenomenon of historicity? (2) What is its position regarding
the phenomenon of subjectivity? (3) How does it explain meaning and signi-
fication? 3
I. IN SEARCH OF A PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF
"NEOSTRUCTURALISM"
LECTURE 2. Neostructuralism as a mode of thought that builds on classical struc-
turalism. Structuralism's foundation in Saussure. 20
LECTURE3. Saussure's presumably orthodox-structuralist followers. The exam-
ple of Lvi-Strauss and the extension of the linguistic basis onto social structures
and "discourses." 34
LECTURE 4. Signs of the dissolution of the classic-taxonomical version of struc-
vi G CONTENTS
turalism in Lvi-Strauss's later works. The outstripping of the structuralist self-
critique by neostructuralism. The idea of a nonclosed and dcentrai structure as
the "germinal thought" of neostructuralism. 48
LECTURE 5. Derrida's antimetaphysical outstripping of Saussure and the con-
ception of an unlimited text. The critique of the idea of a "semantic identity" (of
signs, statements, or utterances). A first definition of "neostructuralism." The
transition to a historical perspective: Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as at-
tempt at a historiography of neostructuralist deconstruction. 65
II. THREE QUESTIONS FOR NEOSTRUCTURALISM
LECTURE 6. The first question: neostructuralism's foundation in the philosophy
of history and its explanation of the phenomenon of historicity. The general situa-
tion of post-Hegelian philosophy. The significance of the romantic precursors.
The shared point of departure of hermeneutics and neostructuralism in Heideg-
ger: on the one hand, Gadamer; on the other hand, Althusser and Foucault. Loss
of the belief in an absolute, self-transparent point of departure of philosophy.
Four critical questions directed at Heidegger's paradigm of history, to the extent
that it is reproduced in his French followers. 87
LECTURE 7. An example of neostructuralist sociology of knowledge and philos-
ophy of history: Foucaulfs Archaeology. An initial reading of The Order of
Things. Introduction to Foucaulfs thought and concepts. 102
LECTURE 8. Continuation of the reading of The Order of
r
Things. Ambiguities
in Foucaulfs position on the Enlightenment's representational model. His expla-
nation of the transition from the Age of Enlightenment (representation) to that of
romanticism (history). 118
LECTURE 9. Continuation of the critical reading. Foucaulfs relationship to the
modern (postromantic) historical sciences. His elimination of the human
sciences. Contradictions and/or obscurities in his rejection of historicism and the
human sciences, including thought in terms of the subject. 132
LECTURE 10. Continuation. Difficulties that the Archaeology experiences with
determining its own history and methodological status without borrowing from
the human sciences. Necessity of a hermeneutic self-reflection on the archaeolog-
ical procedure. 150
LECTURE IL Foucaulfs "Discours de la mthode": The Archaeology of Knowl-
edge. The new definition of the term "discourse." The method of "archaeology"
delimited both from the subsumption model of structuralism, and from historical
thought in continuities. The significance of the "individual moment." Preview of
The Order of Discourse. 166
LECTURE 12. Foucaulfs more recent theory of power as the foundation of his
CONTENTS U vii
"archaeology." Perspectives and aporias of an approach that attempts social cri-
tique without ethics and regresses to vitalistic Social Darwinist categories. The
untenability of the notion of a "discursive police." Transition to the second ques-
tion, which deals with the subject. Romanticism's and Heidegger's critique of the
subject. Subjectivity as the refuge of the metaphysical interpretation of Being.
Four objections to Heidegger's ontological-historical genealogy of subjectivity,
objections that also apply to his neostructuralist followers. 183
LECTURE 13. Nietzsche as predecessor: his genealogy of self-consciousness as
an epiphenomenon of the will to power. The preparation for the language-
philosophical transformation of the problematics of subjectivity. 199
LECTURE 14. The "linguistic turn" as the shared basis of the hermeneutical, ana-
lytical, and neostructuralist transgression of classical philosophy's paradigm of
the subject. Parallels between Tugendhat's and Derrida's critique of Husserl's phi-
losophy of self-consciousness. 215
LECTURE 15. Husserl on "self-consciousness as the principle of apodictic evi-
dence." His dependence on the model of reflection. Derrida's inferences from
this. The inescapability and uncontrollability of linguistically mediated meaning.
The noncoincidence of the related elements in self-relation. 229
LECTURE 16. The rupture of the "living present" by means of the flow of internal
time consciousness in Husserl. Identity and nonidentity of the self. Derrida's con-
clusion that transcendental philosophy must be newly founded on the basis of
differance. 245
LECTURE 17. Derrida's thesis that his philosophy entertains "profound relations
of affinity with Hegel's." The comparison of differance with Hegel's theory of "au-
tonomous negation" (following Dieter Henrich). The dependence of both on the
model of self-consciousness as reflection. 262
LECTURE 18. Critique of Derrida's reduction of "self-consciousness" to an effect
of differential relations between marks. Comparison with the aporias in the theory
of self-consciousness of "neutral monism." Critical delimitation from the authen-
tic Saussure's theory of self-consciousness. Initial introduction to Jacques Lacan's
theory of the subject. The "true" and the "narcissistic" subject. Comparison with
hermeneutics. 279
LECTURE 19. Lacan's critique of Descartes and a comparison to Schelling's con-
frontation with Descartes's thought. The subversion of the subject by the sym-
bolic order. The determination of the mode of Being of the "true subject" and its
relation to the subject of reflection. Objections to Lacan's model of reflection and
his mechanistic reductionism. 295
LECTURE 20. A preview of more recent neostructuralist critiques of thought in
terms of subjectivity: the beginning of a critical reading of Capitalism and
viii G CONTENTS
Schizophrenia I: Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari. The outstripping of La-
can's model of a psychic machine in the desiring-machines. Critique of the
representational model on a basis that itself is representational: the idea of a self-
representation of the will in the realm of representation (Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche). Oedipus as the guarantor of the repressive I-identity. The idea of an
apersonal wish structure: Deleuze and Guattari's theory of schizophrenia. 315
LECTURE 2 L Critique of the idea of a "boundless and unreserved decoding" in
Anti-Oedipus. The nonexclusive disjunction as the mode of combination of flows
of desire in the primary process. Misunderstanding of the coercive aspects that
derive from the grammatical system. The untenable theoretical, ethical, and polit-
ical consequences of the book. Its tendency toward a dangerous form of thought;
its incapacity to distinguish itself from a fascistoid anarchism. 332
LECTURE 22. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II: A Thousand Plateaus. What is
a "rhizome"? The new argumentational strategy of the authors. The idea of an un-
folding of the unregulated multiplicity that is not dominated by the unity of a sub-
ject. The principles of a dcentrai concatenation of elements that have to be con-
ceived as individuals ("singularities"). Interest in the salvation of singular
phenomena and singular subjects. Comparison with the romantic individual her-
meneutics. 345
LECTURE 23. Deleuze's profounder engagement for the individual and the
nonidentical in the theory of the subject presented in his Diffrence et rptition.
Deleuze's idea of repetition as change, delimited from the model of recursivity
of taxonomy. The nonidentical as "individual element" in repetition. Sketch of a
history of the concept of "individual7"individuality." Individuality as the absolute
annoyance for metaphysics and science from Greek philosophy up to linguistics
and subject theory in the present day. Two exceptions: Schleiermacher and
Sartre. Deleuze's opposition to the scientistic opting for the universal. His
difficulty, nevertheless, in conceiving individuality as subjectivity. Appeal to
Kant's schematism. 359
LECTURE 24. Can repetition/change be conceived without recourse to a self-
conscious identity? The "somber precursor" as a sketch of a failed attempt at a
solution. Comparison with Peirce's abductive judgment. Comparison with Saus-
sure's second Cours. Language-philosophical consequences. Borrowings from
and reinterpretation of the pragmatic philosophy of language, especially speech-
act theory. 376
LECTURE 25. Transition to the third question addressed to neostructuralism:
how does it explain meaning and signification? The beginnings of a pragmatic the-
ory of signification in A Thousand Plateaus. Interpretation of "illocutionary
force" as wishful utterance. The reduction of all utterance types to "watch words."
Difficulties in the conception of a self-applicative speech act. Derrida's reception
CONTENTS U ix
and transformation of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism. His confrontation with Austin
and Searle. Uncontrollability of the pragmatic effects of meaning. Critique of the
code model. Refutation of the recursivity of linguistic "types." 392
LECTURE 26. Derrida's examination of Husserl's theory of signs (Speech and
Phenomena). Ideality of meaning as prerequisite, or as a result of its iterability?
The special case of the index word "I." Nonpresence of every signification, and
suspension of Husserl's "principle of principles": "self-dator intuition." The exag-
gerated radicality of the inference Derrida draws for semantics. 410
LECTURE27. Critique of Derrida's inference. An absolutely posited differential-
l y would itself exclude a hypothetical attribution of signification. Comparison
with Lacan's theory of signification. Sketch of a new foundation of semantics on
a hermeneutic basis: Schleiermacher, Peirce, and Saussure. Every use of a sign
and every identification of a sign are grounded in a systematically motivated
hypothetical judgment (an interpretation), which, however, cannot be derived
from a code. 425
Notes 453
Index 477
Foreword
Martin Schwab
I. Frank's Project
This book offers the reader a look at deconstruction from a hermeneutic point of
view. Manfred Frank chooses five representative authors from the contemporary
French sceneJacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles
Deleuze, and Jean-Franois Lyotard to discuss three of their major issues: his-
tory (Lectures 6 through 12), subjectivity (Lectures 12 through 24), and semiotics
(sign, meaning, and interpretation; Lecture 25 to the end).
1
Frank is convinced that "the spiritual situation of the age . . . demand[s] that
we give some thought to a new definition of subjectivity and of individuality"(p.
9). Both antirationalists and many rationalists no longer assign an important role
to the subject if they recognize it as a category in its own right at all. Against
this, Frank sets his own hermeneutic project by asking: "How can one redeem
the fundamental idea of modern humanism which links the dignity of the human
being with his use of freedom" and "do justice to the fundamental fact that subjects
can only form themselves in linguistic, social, cultural, and historical orders?"
(pp. 7-8). It is this insistence on "the constitutive role of subjectivity as the pri-
mary factor in meaning" and history that makes his contribution a unique voice
in the developing debate between rationalism and antirationalism.
2
In What Is Ne-
ostructuralism? the most recent hermeneutic rationalism challenges present
French antirationalism. And this is done not by merely reaffirming the self-
transparent and autonomous subject of the tradition, but in the name of a recon-
ceived subjectivity based upon decenteredness and subservience to forces other
FOREWORD H xi
than its own. The reader will discover that Frank's interest in subjectivity un-
leashes a particularly lively discussion wherever the subject is at stake. Thus he
takes a critical stance toward Foucault's rejection of subjectivity, his contempt for
the humanities (sciences humaines), and the antihermeneutic ideology of his
historiography (Lectures 9 and 10). Similarly, Frank objects to Derrida's elimina-
tion of self-consciousness from the essential elements of subjectivity (Lecture
18), and as a unifying force in semiosis (Lectures 26 and 27).
The book challenges antirationalism not merely by criticizing its ideas but also
through its method. Frank's approach to French deconstruction is reconstruc-
tiveanother hermeneutic feature. His interpretations translate antirationalist
discourse into the discursive language of our intellectual tradition, even sys-
tematizing its ideas to some extent. Incidentally, its patient reconstructive effort
makes the book a valuable introduction to deconstruction as well. From a theoret-
ical point of view, successful reconstruction demonstrates that the gap between
antirationalism and rationalism is not as wide as some antirationalists think it is.
Indeed, Frank even thinks that the division between contemporary rationalism
and its opponents is not a necessary one. He does not, of course, try to "reconcile"
the enemies by explaining away their differences, although he does acknowledge
antirationalist positions like the decenteredness of the subject and the impossibil-
ity of closure of texts. But Frank does believe that a philosophy yet to be con-
ceived might integrate apparently incompatible propositions now held in either
camp into a coherent theory. He supports his belief by the historical observation
that the hermeneutic philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher was such a success-
ful integration. What Is Neostructuralism ? aims at preparing the ground for a phi-
losophy that would achieve for the twentieth century what Schleiermacher ac-
complished for the nineteenth, to "reconstruct a position in the history of modern
European philosophy in which what today is broken apart was conceived of as
two sides of an integral and dialectical movement" (p. 9).
Instead of summarizing his views this foreword tries to provide background
for Frank's specific readings. If What Is Neostructuralism? is a statement in the
debate between contemporary rationalism and antirationalism, it is important to
retrace the history of the intriguing geographical division between French antira-
tionalism and German rationalism (section II). Sketches of general features of
antirationalism and of its recent French version (section III) and of the rationalist
opposition (section IV) are meant to trace a map on which Frank's contribution
can be located. The discussion of hermeneutics (section V) informs us about
Frank's position within the hermeneutic movement. The final section (VI) evalu-
ates the rationality of hermeneutics and concludes with a staged debate between
hermeneutics and deconstruction on the possibility of constructive interpre-
tation.
xii FOREWORD
II. The History of a Division
How did the sharp division between the rationalist and antirationalist camps
emerge? Why is there a French antirationalist group discussed in this book and
a German rationalist group to which Frank belongs? The trajectory that has led
to the present distribution was set in the nineteenth century. At that time, a proc-
ess of differentiation and division had generated two feuding intellectual "fami-
lies." Simultaneously, membership in these families began to be defined in terms
of rationality. Previous oppositions, for instance, between Vico and Descartes,
Newtonian and Paracelsean science, or between Herder and Kant were spurred
by competing conceptions of rationality rather than by the opposition of the ratio-
nal and the antirational. As Foucault has emphasized, a certain binarism and the
idea of a unitary figure of reason had to emerge before the present constellation
became possible.
A bird's-eye view of the last two hundred years of Western intellectual history
reveals vigorous growth in the antirationalist family during the nineteenth cen-
tury. Family ties very often are in or to Germany. Among the earlier antiration-
alists, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche have the
highest visibility today. But other antirational positions also thrived, for instance,
on the right and the left wing of the Hegelians, in the historical school, in her-
meneutics, or in political and social anarchism. By the end of the century the an-
tirationalist current had broadened and was involved in a number of polemics
against rationalist opponents such as Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, and utilitar-
ians. The antirationalist movement peaked in "philosophy of life" (Lebens-
philosophie) and in existentialism before and after World War I. At this moment
it represented the consciousness of an age (Epochenbewusstsein), Again, the Ger-
man intellectual scene was its main theater, in France, Henri Bergson a major
figure. By that time new and strong rationalist adversaries had entered the scene,
among them positivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and the first wave of ana-
lytic philosophy. But antirational attitudes were not weakened. They had long
since begun to make major inroads into predominantly rationalist territory such
as social theory, or psychoanalysis.
At this juncture a decisive event broke the continuity of the antirational evolu-
tion. This event is also a main explanatory factor for the present distribution of
the rationalist and antirationalist camps. Fascism and Nazism gained political
power, in Italy and Germany. In both countries antirationalism had, of course,
helped to pave their way. The official ideologies of both movements also ap-
propriated elements taken from the antirational intellectual doctrines. As dic-
tatorial powers, the political movements favored antirationalist intellectuals and
oppressed rationalist ideas, forcing many of their defenders into retreat or exile.
Considering all this, an antirationalist of the time must have come to the conclu-
sion that history was offering him the unique chance to pursue his intellectual
FOREWORD D xiii
efforts from a position of power and to transform his ideas into everyday reality.
Many antirationalists joined the ranks of fascism and Nazism. Antirationalism
had found its political efficacy, and that was to many of its defendants the criterion
of "truth." The twelve-year regime of the Nazis, their crimes, and their downfall
have decisively redirected antirationalism. The postwar intellectual scene in
France, Germany, and even in America cannot be understood without the un-
paralleled migration of intellectuals and the accompanying rvaluation of in-
tellectual attitudes during, after, and because of Nazism.
In Germany, antirational thought has never recovered from its involvement
with and its instrumentalization by Nazism, at least not to this day. Most of the
present generation of thinkers have been exposed to the experience of Nazism,
and all of them react to it in their thought. Since Heidegger, who continued to
pursue his existentialist project from his forced retreat in the Black Forest, no ma-
jor antirationalist intellectual has emerged in Germany. Existentialism quickly
degenerated into an academic discipline among others, entangled in often sterile
Heideggerian philology. The antirational spirit has, at best, been hibernating in
Germany since the end of World War II. It has been restricted to historical and
philological work on the grand figures of the past or confined to the margins of
the intellectual life, borrowing its topics and gestures from French "master
thinkers." What is more, antirationalism has also lost most of its influence on
other positions. Marxism and the Frankfurt School have revised if not eliminated
antirational elements that had found their way into their theories before and dur-
ing the Second World War. The same revision took place in psychoanalysis
where romanticist elements such as the theory of drives have persistently been
downgraded or rejected. In a parallel move, Gadamer's hermeneutics subtly
transformed Heidegger's predominantly antirational existentialism into a ration-
alism of sorts. Whenever German thinkers after "the War" have had an option,
they have favored the more rationalist alternative. Analytic philosophy, the
Frankfurt School, systems theory (Niklas Luhmann), and neoidealism (Dieter
Henrich, Michael Theunissen), at present the liveliest movements of ambitious
theorizing in Germany, all stress one or the other type of rationality. In this situa-
tion, Frank's book also raises antirationalist issues and arguments in an intellec-
tual community that has done its best to ignore or dismiss them.
The antirational drought in Germany has been matched by unprecedented
growth in France. French thinkers have moved in directions exactly opposite to
those of their German counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century
the country of the Cartesian spirit has become the center of antirationalism. This
is a surprising and unexpected development, for, apart from perhaps the period
of the fin de sicle and Bergson, rationalist currents dominated France until well
after the Second World War. Marxists, neo-Hegelians, phenomenologists, and
even many existentialists took their inspirations from Hegel, Marx, or Husserl.
Is it not remarkable, how much more rationalist Sartre's existentialism is than
xiv FOREWORD
Heidegger's? The structuralism of the fifties completes the picture of rationalist
dominance in France.
But by the fifties and sixties the trickle of a sporadic and disconnected antira-
tionalist production swells and, for the first time since the beginning of this cen-
tury, gathers into a self-conscious current again. Three of the authors presented
by Frank have strongly contributed to generate this "movement": Jacques Lacan's
version of psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault's genealogical historiography and
Nietzschean philosophy of history, and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction have
been more than isolated variations on antirationalist themes. They Wave reformu-
lated and reoriented the antirationalist project. Schools and movements were able
to crystallize around them. The newly acquired spirit of a movement was also able
to draw on the resources of the political "movement" of May 1968, but has never
merely been "The Philosophy of'68," as recent opponents would have it. In spite
of its strong involvement in politics the movement has been curiously light-
handed about the older antirationalist connection with Nazism.
Today a whole array of authors is associated with the antirationalist family.
From an older generation, the names of Gaston Bachelard, Henri Lefebvre,
Gabriel Marcel, and Georges Bataille should be cited. Authors like Michel Leiris,
Emmanuel Lvinas, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Gilles
Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-Franois Lyotard docu-
ment the breadth, variety, and scope of the antirationalist intellectual project. At
present, French antirationalism amounts to not more and not less than a theory
of our age. As such it is unequaled by any other collective intellectual effort now
under way.
III. A Physiognomy of Antirationalism
Antirationalist theorizing denies the possibility or the value of rational knowledge
and rational conduct of life (Weber's rationale Lebensfuhrung), according to
some definition of rationality. This is its negative credo. A general characteriza-
tion in positive terms is more difficult. Antirationalist projects are too diverse,
complex, and, before all, disjointed to be easily summed up. What Is Neostruc-
turalism? gives good accounts of some of the concrete theories. It is, however,
important to see to what extent more general common traits can be found. The
reader must bear in mind that the increasing generality increases injustice to the
minute detail of particular theories. In general terms, then, antirationalism is a
theory and practice of discourse in general, but also of what its own discourse
says, does, and how it achieves its purposes. Thus antirationalists blend the ex-
pressive and the cognitive, the perlocutionary and the illocutionary forces of
speech acts, generating a new type of discursive speech activity. They also favor
a certain ontological model for the things (in the widest possible understanding
of thinghood) that are the topics of their theories, for instance, life, texts, history,
FOREWORD U xv
society, nature, persons. These things basically are presented as processes. Those
processes, furthermore, do not fall into preset patterns or follow directions that
can be abstracted and separated from the ongoing events themselves. In addition
to not being ordered and directed events, those items are also embedded in an
equally disorderly environment that exceeds them. The prevalent normative atti-
tude of this "process philosophy," where it is not merely concerned with negative
directions, is best summed up by Meister Eckhart's term Gelassenheit: an attitude
of letting things happen and of putting oneself in the right frame of mind for let-
ting things happen, rather than of bringing them about at will. Both theoretically
and practically the process has primacy over the structure, the dynamic over the
static. So far my characterization applies to Eastern beliefs, Western mystics, and
to "primitive" thought as well as to antirational Western philosophy, from which
it differs by its theoretical and discursive frame.
I will now try to present more specific features. They are organized around
four themes, typically interwoven in a manner that escapes easy systematization.
The four features are order, metaphysics, representation, and history.
Of those four themes, the first, and in my opinion most important, is order.
The basic "reality" of many antirationalists is chaotic and in constant undirected
flux, unordered or alien to order. In this view, order itself either belongs to the
register of illusion mere figmentor is a constraintimposed upon, conse-
quently suffered by a reality essentially other than and estranged by order. "Basic
reality"
3
may be as variously defined as are Lacan's subject, Derrida's textuality,
Foucault's history, Deleuze's machinery, or Serres's nature. Orders may likewise
vary. They may be systems of categories, or structural or formally definable
orders; they may be the mathematical tools used by natural science or metaphysi-
cal assumptions like that of a pervasive causal connection among events. Those
orders may also be political, institutional, teleological, functional, or of the kind
called "Gestalt." Whatever the order and the field of ordered matter may be, the
ideal type of antirationalist assumes that no presentation of an order of the rele-
vant kind will ever be an adequate presentation of that field. He will also hold
that adequate "knowledge," because it belongs to the field to which it gives access,
will exhibit the logic, here the absence of logic, of that field. Discourse partici-
pates in the logic of its topic.
Does antirationalism reject all order, then? The question is tricky. The rejec-
tion of order concerns rational orders of the types just mentioned. From the point
of view of some antirational "epistemologies," the existence of orders is as doubt-
ful as is their assertibility. How, indeed, would orders be accounted for in antira-
tional discourse? I can think of two types of order with accompanying discourse
that antirationalism might countenance. On the one hand, statistical ideas have
been used by antirationalists, from Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" to Serres's
turbulences, because statistical describability is compatible with the assumption
that the single event does not arise in a directed manner. On the other hand, partie-
xvi FOREWORD
ipation in an ongoing process may be a means to exhibit its order, without describ-
ing it. The idea of a participatory articulation of orders leads to a mimetic notion
of order (romanticism, Walter Benjamin, Anton Ehrenzweig). Participation
would also solve the problem of conceptual presentation by abolishing the
epistemological distance between the thing known and the means used in knowing
it. Antirationalism, then, does not need to reject all order. It selects certain orders
and certain modes of articulation as belonging to rationalism. But it admits odd
orders and deviant ways to present them. Antirationalism is not an irrationalism.
A second theme is metaphysics, the idea of a second order, a different reality
beyond the life-worlds we inhabit. Metaphysicians think that there is a rational
way to know a reality beyond the one we face in our everyday lives. Together
with many rationalists, contemporary antirationalists reject metaphysics. In its
most radical form this rejection of metaphysics "flatly" denies all "beyond" or "be-
neath" of a second level, regardless of whether that level is defined as order or
disorder. In this generality the rejection is more a common attitude of our scien-
tific age than a feature specific to antirationalism. Antirationalists do, however,
have typical reasons for rejecting metaphysics; for them, metaphysics is not so
much a superstition to be overcome by scientific thought, as the core strategy of
rationalism. It posits an apparently accessible ontology of order as a means to
justify the cognition and production of order. Metaphysics is thus the ideology
of order. At first sight the rejection of metaphysics may not look very important.
But closer scrutiny shows that this impression is deceptive. For the scope of possi-
ble antimetaphysical attitudes is impressive. In each of the following pairs of op-
posites one of the two terms may be taken to represent a metaphysical "beyond"
to the other: world and god, subject and external reality, empirical world and
transcendental a priori conditions, language or thought and the world they relate
to, an original social contract and a given social situation. To reject one of the
terms as metaphysical is ipso facto revising the model according to which the
other term has been conceived. Antirationalism is thus engaged in a radical revi-
sion of hitherto fundamental notions.
A third group of antirationalist attitudes concerns language and representa-
tion. At the least radical level, antirationalists doubt that conceptual thought (and
language) is an adequate means to represent or express the basic truths of our
world and our conception of it. A reality that is basically chaotic cannot be ren-
dered conceptually, or it will be violated in the process. The ianguage of concepts
is consequently abandoned in favor of expressive, poetical, highly metaphorical,
often overtly inconsistent forms of discourse. More radical is the idea that lan-
guage and thought do not carry representational power at all, that is, do not relate
to anything over and above the events of thinking or speaking. This idea applies
the antirationalist opposition to order to the field of thought and language, thus
integrating the medium of our attitude toward reality into the reality as antiration-
alism conceives of it. Thought and language are derationalized. By the same to-
FOREWORD G xvii
ken, language and discourse also cease to be objects of rational cognition and
regulation. There will be no explicit ethics of discourse (there is, of course, a
strong implicit normativity in antirational discourse itself), as there will be no
reconstruction of ideas, no interpretations of the meanings of works of art. It is
simply not possible to take toward the medium the distance necessary for a ratio-
nal cognition or evaluation of its meanings. The third attitude is obviously directly
opposed to hermeneutics.
Finally, antirationalists take typical attitudes toward history. Reversing or re-
jecting historical teleology, antirationalists believe either that we have deviated
from a state of anarchic freedom or that history runs in cycles or, most radically,
that events are disconnected and random. Therefore, their philosophy of history
asserts either that history alienates or deviates us from extrahistorical possibilities
or that its form is repetition (Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence") or that it follows
no pattern (absence of order at certain levels of events). Many also think that the
course of history cannot be influenced by human action, thus adding nonshapabil-
ity to the features of history. A historiography informed by this refusal of teleol-
ogy will look for breaks and ruptures instead of continuities, for diversity, plural-
ity, and nonsimultaneity instead of unity and connectedness. It will also look for
those elements in the past that are subdued or oppressed by the forces of order.
And it will stress that orders are constraints, be they occidental logos or modern
rationality.
I have presented four general features that, taken together, would define the
ideal type of a modern antirationalist. What is the originality of the present French
scene? What does it add to, omit from, how does it vary the general picture? The
first trait I would merely like to mention is the particular mixture of intellectual
sources. Nietzsche and Heidegger are the two antirationalists, de Saussure is the
one rationalist whose doctrines have been most influential in shaping the ideas of
the present French "school" of antirationalists in France. The reader will find that
What Is Neostructuralism? gives careful attention to these affiliations. A second
trait is a certain antitraditionalism. Unlike many rational doctrines that have
evolved from traditions into which they also insert themselves, many contem-
porary antirational positions are deviations from or transformations of formerly
rationalist disciplines. Lacan's psychoanalysis and Foucault's historiography of
discourse are cases in point. Even for Derrida the point of departure has been
Husserlian phenomenology, not Heideggerian existentialism or Nietzschean
"philosophy of life." Some recent antirationalists seem to break from disciplines
with a former strongly rationalist orientation. I refer again to Foucault and Lacan.
Their theories can also be viewed as antirational only incidentally, or only as
embedded in the concrete enterprise of achieving some goal in their respective
disciplines, the writing of history, and the practice and teaching of psychoanaly-
sis. In pursuing those goals they often appropriate tools from the antirationalist
arsenal without much concern about their previous usage. The new antirational-
xviii G FOREWORD
ism is thus more eclectic and more concrete, more strongly marked by the rup-
tures it effectuates in a rational field than by its debt and contribution to the antira-
tionalist tradition itself. This trait is as indicative of foundational difficulties in
the disciplines thus transformed, as it is of the weakening force of our intellectual
tradition, regardless of its rationalist or antirationalist orientation. A certain ob-
liviousness, advocated by Nietzsche about a century ago, is itself a symptom of
the crisis of historical tradition.
The second global originality of present French antirationalism is a topical
breadth and positivity previous antirationalism did not possess. There is hardly
a field in the humanities and social sciences to which it has not made some contri-
bution. The vast array of its philosophical topics ranges from Bataille's economics
of expense to Lacan's theory of decentered subjectivity, from Foucault's historical
reconstructions of forms and constraints of rationality to Baudrillard's sociology
of symbolic value and a media-generated simulatory reality, from Serres's in-
terpretations of dynamic nature and speculations on cybernetics and systems the-
ory to Derrida's all-embracing, uncontrollable textuality that it is constantly "on
the move." Frank has to select from a wealth of topics and authors when he
chooses history, subjectivity, and semiotics as topics for his presentation in What
Is Neostructuralism? And contemporary antirationalists, unlike skeptics, do not
use up their forces in merely destructing the claims of reason. They offer positive
alternative accounts in most of the core fields of rationality. Antirationalism is,
as I said earlier, a full-fledged "project," in the sense in which "the project of en-
lightenment" has been understood and propagated by Habermas, or the sense in
which there have been the projects of ancient philosophy or of romanticism. One
may even wonder whether its scope, ambition, and positive articulation have not
begun to transform antirationalism into a theory of alternative reason.
Finally, the French movement is specific through its unique philosophical
style. (On its own assumptions, the question of style is, of course, simultaneously
and undistinguishably a question of substance.) Individual members of the French
antirational family have their highly specialized physiognomies. I would even
contend that no contemporary current offers a variety and distinctness of personal
styles and expressions comparable to that of the vigorously antipersonal family
of doctrines gathered under the label of antirationalism. Yet all of its thinkers
strike the reader with the highly literary character of their expression. The obvi-
ous contrast to the more conceptual tradition has exasperated nonfollowers, par-
ticularly philosophers. The change is deep indeed, for contemporary antiration-
alists have "poeticized" their expression even when they are compared to Hegel,
Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche, all of them "literary" writers and often despised for
their literariness. The distinctive new language of present antirational thought is
not, as some might think, merely due to an effort to express beautifully or ele-
gantly what could also be expressed otherwise. Its style is, on the contrary, the
result of the conviction or will that doctrinal substance and expressive prsenta-
FOREWORD G xix
tion must not be separated (antirepresentationalism) and that language, properly
spoken, generates "thought" (Gelassenheit). Thought and style merge, as mean-
ing and expression were seen to do.
The idea of an indissoluble bond between expression and the expressed is an
old one. It has been an integral part of mystic and hermetic traditions and of
romanticism. New, however, is the secularized belief that metaphorically
"pressed" or "released" language yields a thought all its own, or, more radically
even, that only metaphorical procedures are adequate to exhibit the dynamic, in-
determinable, and multiple character of all semiosis or, if it is different, of reality
at large. Contemporary French antirationalism has aestheticized philosophical
discourse. Language has become a "thinking matter," not a datum for or a tool
of analysis. This philosophy of language explains why antirationalist writings of-
ten read more like surrealist, symbolist, or modern literary texts than like the dis-
cursive texts of our tradition, including the oppositional authors of the last cen-
tury. The same philosophy of language also helps us to understand why many
antirationalist texts present themselves in deviant forms. With the exception of
romanticism I know of no intellectual movement that has so deliberately ex-
perimented with forms of expression in the field of intellectual discourse. Literar-
iness, even poeticity of its theoretical expression and form, is certainly the most
conspicuous among the distinctive traits of modern antirationalism.
This concludes my physiognomy of antirationalism. What does present Ger-
man rationalism look like?
IV. Three Rationalists: Tugendhat, Habermas, and Luhmann
Rationalism asserts what antirationalism rejects. Rationalists think that we are not
in principle prevented from conceptual knowledge about reality and argue that
we can, indeed ought to, conduct our lives rationally. In choosing the three
authors discussed here I have opted for wildly different rationalist approaches
united, however, by their ambition toward general inclusive theory. Niklas Luh-
mann, Jiirgen Habermas, and Ernst Tugendhat try to put forward general theories
of rationality for and of our era. The positions they reach will, by the same token,
define the conflict between the two rival attitudes. It is in the field of rationality
staked out by authors such as these that Frank's philosophical position will have
to find a place of its own.
Ernst Tugendhat
A theory of rationality proposed by an analytic philosopher will be founded
semantically,
4
and rely neither on a metaphysical "beyond" nor on a consensus
among reasonable persons. According to Tugendhat, we find out what we accept
as reasons for our beliefs and norms by analyzing the ways in which we use
xx FOREWORD
words. The analyzability of our language is a methodological premise of his the-
ory of rationality. Fortunately, language also reveals to us the implicit network
of our rationality. At its most general level, Tugendhat's rationality is the tradi-
tional "justification by reasons," the giving of an account for an attitude we hold
{Ausweisbarkeit). We are interested in justification because we take positions
(Stellungnahme) on ourselves and our environment, adopting certain beliefs, re-
jecting others, and because it makes a difference whether we make the right
choices among them. Ultimately, all taking of positions relates back to the fact
that we take positions vis--vis our own lives. Heideggerian Dasein is here ration-
alized by its insertion into the structure of our language, interpreted in the sense
of analytic philosphy.
Tugendhat develops a ramified theory of theoretical reason by examining con-
ditions under which we justify truth claims about the world. In a manner typical
for his analytic approach he looks for these conditions, not in the categories of
the understanding, but in the semantic structure of assertoric sentences, which we
use to make and to argue our truth claims. The fact that we refer to things and
say something about them is a basic order of reason, seconded by other orders,
notably space and time and the perspectival subjective orders of indexicals ( "I,"
"here," "now"). In a similar manner, Tugendhat approaches the theory of subjec-
tivity. He does not try to elaborate a model of consciousness or self-
consciousness, but starts from what he calls "practical self-relatedness" or the tak-
ing of a practical attitude toward oneself {praktisches Sichzusichverhalten). This
relation of self to self obtains, for example, when we deliberate in order to deter-
mine what is best to do in a given situation. Finally, Tugendhat proposes an ethics
of universalizability in which we accept as morally good only those social norms
that can be justified as being equally good for all parties concerned.
Even this very rudimentary outline of Tugendhat's theory of rationality will
demonstrate how closely he follows the lines of the philosophical tradition. This
proximity, however, should not be allowed to obscure a fundamental difference.
Based on semantics rather than on ontology or subjectivity, his analytic rational-
ity aspires to forgo the metaphysical burden incurred by older rationalists. If this
model of rationality is successful in its foundational and nonmetaphysical preten-
sions, then it will not be hurt by the rejection of metaphysics that was seen to be
an important part of the antirationalist program. More important still: In agree-
ment with many other analytic philosophers, Tugendhat appeals to order in lan-
guage and to orders that are sustained by language, thus directly opposing one
of the antirational theorems. Against the idea that orders are fictions or con-
straints the analytic rationalist sets his contention of a demonstrable and concep-
tual order of language, and the thesis that those orders are necessary conditions
of our worldview.
It has become obvious where the confrontation between antirationalism and
FOREWORD D xxi
analytic rationalism along the line of Tugendhat's thought will take place. On the
one hand, it is to be expected that the antirationalist will not accept the analytic
claim to be beyond metaphysics. On the other hand, each side disputes the views
on language held by the other side. This second topic has indeed been the object
of the only major debate between an analytic and a deconstructionist philosopher.
It is the polemics that has opposed Jacques Derrida and John Searle over the in-
terpretation of Austin's theory of speech acts. Their debate has not done much
to clarify the issues, however.
5
Jiirgen Habermas
If the debate between analytic rationalism and antirationalism remains, in Der-
rida's word, "unlikely," the confrontation between antirationalism and the "Frank-
furt School" is well on its way.
6
"Critical theory of society," originally a critique
of capitalist society and culture as well as of orthodox Marxism that had taken
its inspirations from the early Marx and Hegel, had absorbed a strong dose of an-
tirationalism before and during the Second World War. The peak of this influence
was reached in Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of En-
lightenment J Its main thesis is antirationalist: reason establishes its rule over al-
ternative beliefs, becomes the ideology of the masters in the struggle between the
dominating and the dominated, and erects the systems of internal domination and
of self-discipline that enable the masters to rule while alienating them from them-
selves. The conclusion, however, remains rationalist. Adorno and Horkheimer
think that enlightenment can be enlightened about its own predicament and might
overcome its disastrous consequences.
Confirming the rationalist trend among German philosophers, Habermas has
recently "modernized" the "Frankfurt School."
8
He has reduced the weight of the
philosophical nineteenth century in critical theory, integrated contemporary so-
ciology and social psychology into its social theory, and renewed the foundations
of the theory. His new foundation is here of particular interest because it also in-
troduces a new form of rationalism, the idea of "communicative reason." This
idea urges us to accept as rational only those theories, rules, or social institutions
whose claims to validity would be found to be acceptable in a general debate itself
free of the constraints of a given social situation. Communicative reason is
universal consensus without constraint. Habermas historicizes and relativizes his
idea of communicative reason so much that the remaining universalism loses most
of its dependencies on Enlightenment metaphysics.
Habermas also proposes an analysis of modernity. Social systems, he argues,
originally freed individuals from burdens imposed upon them by traditional ways
of life. Today, however, the systems have achieved functional autonomy and
dominate individuals' life-worlds. As a consequence, autonomous self-realization
xxii D FOREWORD
has become more and more difficult. Frustrated individuals are therefore less and
less willing to perform the functions required for the systems. An impoverished
life-world ceases to be the resource the systems need to feed from. Social patholo-
gies ensue. Abandoning the idea of an alienation of man from himself or of reason
from itself, Habermas diagnoses a historically generated conflict between in-
dividual aspirations and the demands of social systems as one of the diseases of
modernity.
Communicative reason plays three roles in this critical theory of modernity.
Between individuals, it distinguishes permissible self-realization from infringe-
ments on others' freedom. Between systems and life-worlds, it mediates between
accepted functions of systems and the limitations on the pursuit of individual hap-
piness. Between the systems, finally, a politically institutionalized communica-
tive reason advocates the interests of the whole, a function that includes virtual
interests as well as the existing and particular interests of the systems.
Once more, the opposition to antirationalism is palpable. To mention but one
central point of dissension: For Habermas the dissolution of the modern pattern
of social systems poses a threat to liberty. For antirationalism, the same system
is unconditionally a constraint and a form of domination. Habermas's opposition
raises two problems for antirationalism. Why should we consider order a con-
straint, something to be overcome? To be sure, concrete orders can become op-
pressive. But developments are contingent and may be reversible. How does the
antirationalist justify his principled rejection of all rational order? Does he not
found his assumption that order comes as a constraint on a metaphysics ontologi-
cally different from the tradition only by invoking a beyond of freely floating
forces? Habermas also recalls to our minds that the project of enlightenment per-
vades our attitudes, values, and social institutions by reminding us of the genesis
of our social institutions. Implicitly, all of us have "always and already" sub-
scribed to some of those values. Should we, then, not also explicitly espouse what
we in fact enjoy? Indeed, Habermas thinks that we ought to. In contrast to
Tugendhat, however, he offers not a semantic but a communicative argument in
support of those values.
His emphasis on an ideal consensus as a criterion for reason uncovers a foun-
dational weakness in the opposition to rationalism. Antirationalism either uses the
pathos of freedom (liberation from an oppressive order, leaving the sense of free-
dom largely undetermined), or it tries to persuade us to adopt certain nonrational
attitudes. In both cases it faces the question of why we should adopt its proposals.
Antirationalism is thus led into a foundational trilemma which it must resolve.
It either bases itself on some metaphysical assumptions (e.g., Nietzsche's will to
power) or resorts to some kind of nonmetaphysical basis to give us reasons (e.g.,
the late Foucault) or is an avowedly arbitrary proposal. Habermas denounces
practical consequences of antirationalism and insists on the positive value of au-
tonomy.
FOREWORD U xxiii
Niklas Luhmann
My third example of a contemporary competitor for the position of rationality is
Luhmann's systems theory and functionalism.
9
Luhmann's point of departure is
the idea that society consists of and is dominated by dynamic systems that emerge,
maintain, and transform themselves through activities of their own and in interac-
tion with an environment. He thus asserts the primacy of collective agencies over
individuals in society. Self-shaping (and, incidentally, self-preserving) dynamic
social systems are the prime agents in modern industrialized societies. Their
primacy over other agents (e.g., individuals, groups like parties, unions, etc.) is
manifest in the resistance the systems oppose to intentional alteration. In-
dividuals, on the other hand, are formed in systems (e.g., the educational system)
to fulfill functions necessary for the systems, and the systems provide what the
individuals need to satisfy their wants. But the reverse is not true. Systems are
independent of the particular individuals who enact their functions. This practical
pessimism would rank Luhmann among the politically conservative antiration-
alists.
His picture of modernity shows our societies as undergoing a global evolution-
ary process of social transformation. In its course, the dominant mode of differen-
tiation of Western societies changes from a stratified to a functional mode. Hier-
archies such as class, or descending relations running from superior to inferior,
lose their importance while relations of mutuality such as exchange or interaction,
capacities like mobility or skills that help to adapt to highly variable environments
gain in importance. These changes do not occur in a social field separate from
the cultural. For all its relative autonomy the semantics of our symbolic systems
also changes. And its changes are in accordance with the social transformation
under way.
The cognitive rationalism of Luhmann's social theory is obvious enough not
to need further emphasis. More interesting, however, is the type of rationality
attributed to his primary agents, the systems. They secure their continued exis-
tence in time by organizing their behavior into patterns that guide their transac-
tions, both internal and external. These patterns include the symbolic media
through which they operate. Social systems thus follow a rationality of self-
shaping (autopoesis) and adaptation akin to evolutionary biology. The formation
of patterns or structures is a rational activity. The systems also try actively to con-
trol their "matter," including individuals, and their environment. Here, their aim
is to induce their interior and their exterior to function according to the values
of the system. There is, therefore, a rationality of systems integration as well as
a rationality of systems formation. Finally, Luhmann's social theory contains an
implicit ethics addressed to individuals. Its imperative is mimetic: "Do not med-
dle with the systems; rather, do what is best with regard to the special rationality
of the system in which you operate."
xxiv D FOREWORD
The theory may seem to be restricted to the social domain. But the scope of
"systems rationality" is really much larger than might appear. It extends to every-
thing that is relevant to the system. Personality, ideologies, personal desires and
wants, political and economic attitudes, and semantic values are all subsumed un-
der and evaluated in terms of the social systems. Functionalist rationality posits
systems values first, and judges other items according to how they relate to those
values. In principle, the criteria of functional rationality are universal. They may
be applied to the rationality of hypotheses, of science as an institution, to the ques-
tion of the good life for a person or the evaluation of art. Functionalism is not
just a social theory. It is an ambitious rationalism that gives primacy to the social
realm.
I find this theory particularly relevant in a debate between contemporary ra-
tionalism and antirationalism. For in Luhmann, antirationalism encounters a con-
temporary rationalist that draws opposite conclusions from shared observations.
Functionalism and antirationalism meet, for instance, in their rejection of enlight-
enment and of static structuralism. Both insist that we recognize a plurality of
freely developing agencies, and that a comprehensive unity or unification is an
impediment to the possibly chaotic and desirable development of those agencies.
Both emphasize free play, albeit for different types of "players." Both deny teleol-
ogy in history. And yet Luhmann's interpretations and conclusions tend to con-
tradict antirationalism throughout. Again, I mention only one decisive point of
divergence. Where antirationalism states or propagates disorder, Luhmann states
and propagates order. To be sure, it is the particular order of the plurality of inter-
acting autopoetic systems. This order is neither preset nor foreseeable nor
uniquely determined at any given point in time. Instead, it is a multidimensional
order that emerges in the course of events. In short, functionalist order is not
"closed." Nevertheless, this functional order of a system and of systems can be
analyzed by science. Functionalist rationality thus sees order as an immanent,
emerging, and "proper" quality of (social) reality. Antirationalism sees order ac-
cording to the model of constraint, as nonexistent or "improper," either imposed
from the outside or arising from a deviation from a truer unordered reality or self.
Here order is a constraint of a chaotic and mobile reality; there a dynamic "au-
topoetic" reality falls by itself into constantly changing patterns. It would be par-
ticularly interesting to confront these two attitudes.
The three members from the rationalist family I have presented all emphasize
order, although they favor different types of order in different fields, and on
different dimensions. All three look for new foundations of the orders they favor.
Language, society, and an ideal community serve as anchoring fields for the prin-
ciples of rationality. In various ways the three authors try to avoid metaphysical
assumptions and traditional philosophies of history. All three, however, raise
problems for antirationalism. Can we speak without presupposing that language
is a rule-guided conceptual activity embedding a minimal rationality as a prereq-
FOREWORD xxv
uisite for all discourse? Do we not have a genuine interest in both individual au-
tonomy and institutions? Does our seemingly chaotic modern life-world not ex-
hibit orders that can be apprehended and recognized?
The present state of the debate between rationalism and antirationalism is con-
fusing. Contemporary French antirationalism has directed most of its arrows
against older forms of rationality. Some of the rationalist responses suffer from
the same default in refusing to acknowledge the full impact and seriousness of
the antirationalist attack. Understandably, there has been a tendency on both sides
to perceive the opponent in terms of older positions. Where this happens a straw-
man, and not the real opponent out there, is set up and torn apart. Unfortunately,
a certain belatedness is still the rule in the debate between rationalism and antira-
tionalism. I have tried to point to some of the issues at stake between more recent
rationalist attempts and antirationalism. Among the existing samples of the
general debate, What Is Neostructuraiism? is a rare exception, because it both
raises the basic issues and does it on the level of their most advanced theorizing.
V. Three Hermeneutic Positions: Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Frank
An account of contemporary hermeneutics, the fourth of my contenders for ra-
tionalism, must begin by mentioning Heidegger's not so rationalist analysis of
"being there" (Dasein) as presented in Being and Time, for it is the common para-
digm of both Gadamer's and Ricoeur's rationalism. "Being there," as is well
known, is concerned with its own being ("Es geht dem Dasein in seinem Sein urn
dieses Sein," section 4, Being and Time), "Dasein" operates and articulates itself
in understanding and interpretation. Our condition is therefore hermeneutic
throughout, far beyond the utterances we proffer and receive. What is true for
the Entwilrfe of everyday existence is also true for theory: to lay out the existential
features of Dasein is to engage in interpretation and in hermeneutic theory. Fun-
damental ontology participates in the hermeneutic character of "being there"; her-
meneutics is a universal discipline.
10
Hans Georg Gadamer
Gadamer transforms Heidegger's global and sketchy hermeneutics by singling out
one of its aspects.
11
Instead of pursuing the analysis of Dasein or the ontology
of Sein, he chooses to explore the hermeneutic experience and asks how it is
grounded in our condition. Truth and Method is an ontology of understanding
(Verstehen).
As a whole, Gadamer's theory oscillates between two points of view, not easily
blended into a coherent picture. On the one hand, he adopts a more global, dis-
tant, and external perspective that is less rationalist. On the other hand, he also
takes a more individualized, proximate, and internal point of view. Here,
xxvi n FOREWORD
Gadamer is much more rationalist. I begin with the more global view in which
our sense-making activities are embedded in cultural meanings we neither create
nor control. The dynamics of those cultural meanings Gadamer calls Sinngesche-
hen: a mass and a flux of events that are occurrences of meaning or sense, a slow
and continual turnover of cultural meanings, not unlike the matter glaciers trans-
port on their way down from the mountains. All things meaningful fall into this
mass. Nothing is beyond that flux or exempt from it. Reason therefore always
comes to us in form of a particular section of the moving mass or flux. Gadamer's
reason is irredeemably historicized. It does not retain an atemporal and founda-
tional validity prior to and external to Sinngeschehen. The movement is not only
ungrounded, it is also undirected. There is no measure to state decline, constraint,
or progress. Teleology is thus expelled from the history of reason. Furthermore,
no unitary or unified being, Zeitgeist or Weltgeist, realizes itself at any given mo-
ment in time. Nothing, therefore, sustains the unity of the many occurrences of
meaning at a given time. On the global level, the only classical feature of rational-
ity maintained by Gadamer is continuity clearly favored over discontinuity.
Gadamer's faith in continuity may express the pondered "prejudice" of a historian
whose culture has taught him that everything is connected. But for him, continuity
is a value as well; its loss results in decline. Continuity is, of course, an important
and controversial assumption particularly since Foucault has emphasized discon-
tinuities in history; Derrida, the heterogeneity of the text.
This is not yet the end of Gadamer's antirationalist tendencies, for the different
occurrences of meaning (Sinngeschehen) effect (bewirken) each other. History is
thus the history of these effects and effectings (Wirkungsgeschichte). The flux of
events reveals itself to be a web of effectings. By ontologizing these effectings,
Gadamer comes close to some of the more recent theories of the text. His occur-
rences or events of sense are not independent units, which have an existence of
their own and enter into relations with each other only contingently. The occur-
rences are the relations of being effected (passive) and of effecting (active). This
relational ontology of Sinngeschehen overcomes the historicist idea of influence
for which occurrences of meaning (Sinnereignisse) are connected through bonds
of derivation or dependence running from earlier to later meanings (influence).
Gadamer advocates the much more radical idea that the effects of those meaning-
ful events contribute to the very identity of those events, and that these effects may
lie in the past and in the future. Gadamerian "effectuation" has retroactive force,
besides effecting the future. The consequences of his ontology are reflected in two
of Gadamer's basic concept metaphors: "play" and "dialogue." Both in "play"
(Spiel) and in "dialogue/conversation" (Gesprch), ulterior moves contribute to
the meaning of preceding events. Understanding participates in what is to be un-
derstood. Specific meanings are constituted in the process of understanding and
interpretation.
Thus far, Gadamer's Sinngeschehen will not appear to be a rational event. Ra-
FOREWORD xxvii
tionality, if at all, will reside in the ways in which occurrences of meaning are
related. Antirationalism would follow if every new event turned out to be entirely
unbound by its predecessors and were able to confer on those predecessors what-
ever meaning it, the later event, happened to choose. Meanings would be erratic
and would lack enduring determinacy.
In the global view presented so far, Gadamer's hermeneutics adopts a conser-
vative, pessimistic, and somewhat stoic antirationalism. These traits are particu-
larly visible in his "rehabilitation of prejudice" and in his recommendation that
we align with the tradition instead of trying to emancipate from it.
The rationalist countercurrent of this not very strongly unified doctrine ap-
pears from a more individual or more internal point of view. Sense-making activi-
ties are performed by individual persons, through individual conduct, and result
in individual works. The writing or reading of a book, the bringing up of one's
children, psychotherapy or reflecting on one's own history, all these activities ob-
viously involve agents and actions. What people do in these instances cannot be
reduced to what a switchboard does to the electrical currents that traverse it.
Agents come to their sense-making activities with prejudices, interests, and prob-
lems. These are internal factors determining understanding. But the current of un-
derstanding runs the other way, too: prejudices will be changed by a hermeneutic
experience, interests will be redefined, initial problems will be transformed.
From a point of view internal to a sense-operating being who, in these transac-
tions, is concerned with his or her own being, the meanings from the cultural en-
vironment stand in need of appropriation, adaptation, and application to the situa-
tion. In short, they are not externally given data, but meanings individually
constituted in the process. The "operation called understanding" has an individual
and productive side that remained invisible from the distance of the global view.
In the proximity of the sense-making activity itself, two complementary rational
traits take profile. The interpreter or understanding agent looks for understanding
in order to come to grips with him- or herself, the environment, and the demands
of the situation. To be in search of understanding is to be involved in a rational
activity. This is why the agent will try to construe his or her meanings as coher-
ently and as comprehensibly as possible.
!2
The agent will, for instance, try to un-
derstand him- or herself, to make sense of his or her own history or the institu-
tions he or she has to cope with, etc. Sense-making stretches from everyday,
piecemeal, and individual problem solving to the collective construction of a
mythology or a cosmology. To be sure, no interpretive activity is able to grasp
the totality of the cultural or even of the individual meanings attached to the con-
crete problem to which it is applied. The subject of hermeneutics cannot reach
transparency and mastery of his or her own destiny, nor can that subject assemble
the totality of the meanings of a work. The subject nevertheless may be able to
achieve a limited knowledge and control of his or her life or that work. On the
agent's level, Gadamer's rationality goes as far as espousing values borrowed
xxviii FOREWORD
from enlightenment. The agent can be enlightened about the fact that he or she
is an "effected meaning." This is the much-discussed wirkungsgeschichtliches Be-
wusstsein, a consciousness arising in history, determined by history, and con-
scious of arising in history as so determined. Simultaneously, it is also, but only
partially, determining history, and likewise conscious of doing so. Historicized
"reason" has overcome the prejudices of enlightenment, but it is still capable of
being enlightened about itself. And the pathos of Gadamer's plea for a self-
consciously hermeneutical attitude suggests that to be or not to be thus enlight-
ened makes a practical difference, for instance, for continuity or forgetfulness.
Understanding turns out to be a bipolar activity. Its two poles are the under-
standing agents and the "thing" (die Sache) to be understood. What is the scope
of understanding? Again, it would be too narrow to extend it to the work of art
and the text of intellectual discourse alone. The possible subject matter of under-
standing includes anything that can fill the blank of "x is understood as (mean-
ing) . . ."This allows historical episodes, decisions of courts, and political deci-
sions to be macroobjects; words, sentences, individual actions to be rnicroobjects
of understanding.
The "objective" pole of understanding also gives rise to a normative rationality
of its own. Here the task is not, as it was for the subject, self-shaping under condi-
tions of limited control. The matter or object requires recognition for what it may
be "itself," that is, as something possibly other than what the interpreter thinks
it is or wants it to be. Gadamer strongly defends an ethics of otherness at the exact
opposite of the interest of appropriation characteristic of the "subjective" pole.
That same otherness is also the source of the cognitive element in hermeneu-
tics. For recognition of otherness includes distance, at times even intentional es-
trangement, of the understanding agent vis--vis the object. Otherness is not
given; it needs active construction and recognition. I interpret this as a highly ra-
tionalist feature of Gadamer's hermeneutics, as opposed to methodological ar-
bitrariness as to the negation of otherness in some antirationalist theories of the
text.
Understanding has to fulfill yet another rational task. Reflection, problem
solving, and self-shaping on the subjective side, as well as otherness on the objec-
tive side, all call for an interpretation as comprehensive and coherent as possible.
Incoherence, scatteredness and disconnectedness are negative values. They are
a challenge to an understanding whose task is primarily constructive. Lack of
connectedness is not, as it is in deconstruction, propagated, but rather is limited
to the smallest amount imposed by the object. The subject has to construe his or
her meanings and him- or herself as a thoroughly connected being. Gadamer's
ideal is that of the integrated personality, the individual pendant to a closely knit
tradition.
To sum up my presentation of Gadamer's hermeneutic rationalism: A radically
relativized and historicized reason relegates the subject (and the work) to the
FOREWORD U xxix
limited space of self-shaping. But agents can be enlightened about their limita-
tions as well as their possibilities. Somewhat stoically, the subject continues to
construct the most coherent self to be obtained under the circumstances by draw-
ing on the meaning resources of its environment, most notably on its tradition.
The collective efforts of the many subjects continue the tradition.
Paul Ricoeur
Ricoeur's impressive oeuvre is the second huge body of contemporary hermeneu-
tic thought.
13
If Gadamer asks "What is understanding and how is it grounded in
the human condition?" Ricoeur's questions are "Who are we? What can we know?
What are we to do?" In terms of the existentialist framework adopted by Ricoeur
the primary interest is in the "Who" of Dasein, not in its basic mode of operation.
But Ricoeur is convinced that reflection cannot begin by exploring phenomena
allegedly presenting themselves, phenomena like Dasein (Heidegger) or art
(Gadamer). There is no privileged type of experience. Ricoeur therefore opts for
working through the dazzling plurality of cultural meanings religious, aesthetic,
or philosophical in order to detect how we have objectified ourselves into these
forms that are simultaneously the forms that shape us. It is important to note that
Ricoeur's aim is not a panorama of the objective spirit or of symbolic forms, but
hermeneutic reflection on our lived experience. Who are we, beings who not only
produce and suffer those symbols but also cast our individual experiences in their
terms? From Gadamer's global view we are merely immersed in the mass of our
cultural forms. But according to Ricoeur, that "second nature" both obscures,
even hides from us, and reveals to us our particular truth at this particular juncture
of history. In short, Ricoeur wants to read our existential condition, and a histori-
cized one at that, from the spcifie symbolic forms of our era.
Such a program changes the theoretical stance itself. Instead of straightfor-
wardly building his own theories Ricoeur constantly discusses other theories
pressed to disclose their partial truths about ourselves. I choose subjectivity, in-
terpretation, and language as three topics directly relevant to the frame of Frank's
book.
If it is impossible to go straight to the matter of the subject itself, because the
truth of the subject is revealed neither by consciousness nor in existential self-
disclosedness, then the subject has to gain access to itself as it does to other enti-
ties, that is, indirectly. For a symbolic and symbolizing being, self-reflexion is
interpretation of the symbolic manifestations of the self. Psychoanalysis, not
idealism, is therefore Ricoeur's paradigm for a modern theory of subjectivity. All
access to the subject is thus mediate and mediated by cultural meanings. What
do these meanings reveal about the subject, notably about his or her predicament
to self-fashion freely? How is freedom possible if the conditions of the situation
have in advance determined what an agent can choose to bring about? Ricoeur
xxx D FOREWORD
tries to solve the problems to which those questions allude through the symbol
elevated by him to the rank of an existential concept. The symbol is overdeter-
mined and overdetermining. It is both, and simultaneously, determined by factors
such as tradition, environment, or archaic heritage and produced in a free project
constituting a world and a self through the meanings it assumes. The symbol
selects its causes and constitutes a project. Freedom and determination coincide
and coexist in the symbol. Ricoeur's symbol serves as a medium that provides a
feeling, willing, and knowing subject with the distance toward self and environ-
ment. This distance is a necessary condition for free self-production. The symbol
confers on the subject a space of its own, and simultaneously ties the subject to
the larger contexts on which it depends.
The symbol is also what makes the knowledge of self possible. It objectifies
a symbolizing activity into works. This symbolizing activity is not in control of
its own ground. The work, in turn, does not release its deeper meanings before
a special effort is made and special methods are used. This is because the work
has been shaped by unconscious and uncontrolled driving forces. And yet they
yield to interpretation because they are symbols marked by and exhibiting the im-
pact of those forces that themselves may lie deeply hidden in the material.
Interpretation has the task of uncovering those signifying forces and factors.
In addition to its more traditional functions, methodologically controlled interpre-
tation also reflectively reappropriates meanings that are otherwise beyond the
realm of conceptual awareness. Interpretation is therefore the proper reflective
activity. Is there also a "proper" way to reflect interpretively? Ricoeur puts for-
ward a complex theory of interpretive phases-not, of course, consecutive steps
of interpretation-each of which requires a methodological conscience of its own.
Interpretation construes the immanent meanings of its object, for instance, a nar-
rative. In the constructive phase considerations of application or of consistency
do not yet matter. Another, referential, phase is the articulation of the implicit
worldview of a work. The world to which the work refers is the world implicated
by the object, its world "picture," not our "real" world, although the implied world
is ultimately related to "our" world. Finally, in the third phase the interpreter in-
terprets him- or herself in the light of the worldview presented by the object. This
phase is the application of meaning to self. The three phases are moments of a
dialectical reflective process.
Another aspect typical of Ricoeur's approach is his discussion of theories that
have come as challenges to traditional hermeneutics. Among others, Ricoeur dis-
cusses and uses psychoanalysis, linguistic structuralism, and analytic philosophy
of language, in sharp contrast to the narrowness, if not parochialness, of Heideg-
ger and Gadamer. Ricoeur's usual strategy is to respond to the challenge of oppos-
ing theories by giving up some traditional territory in order to secure the hold of
hermeneutics on the rest. He concedes, for instance, that language is rule-
governed up to the linguistic level of the well-formed sentence. On this level we
FOREWORD U xxxi
deal with a socially and semantically predetermined form that, for that reason,
is inappropriate for creative self-projection. Similarly for reference: In referring
to a reality that transcends the referring speech or text, and in predicating some-
thing of this reality, we have to submit to the semantic and logical bonds of lan-
guage. But metaphor and symbol are not so determined, nor are the larger and
unregulated products of our symbolic activity, among them the text. Texts, more-
over, do not depict an outside reality. They are the medium in which the freedom
of the individual finds expression and design in the invention of selves and
worlds.
My concluding observations examine Ricoeur's view of rationality. Compared
to Gadamer, Ricoeur's greater emphasis on rationality is palpable. Not only do
we not encounter Gadamer's tradition, in advance appropriating each and every
individual effort, but everything that has symbolic character is open to reflection
and appropriation. Where Gadamer's appropriation of the tradition most often ap-
pears as a blind process whose very blindness reflection cannot but acknowledge,
Ricoeur insists on the possibility of conceptual elucidation. It is as if he had "ap-
propriated" the idealist project of a reflectively self-producing supersubject, but
adapted it to the new conditions of a world and a subjectivity decentered, dis-
persed, and constituted by symbolic forces beyond reflexive control, but no
longer constituted by a self-conscious supersubject. If those constraints bar the
idealist project, they do allow us to redefine reflexivity and self-shaping in the
symbolic medium. The medium limits the scope of transparency and control, but
opens the large intermediate area of interpretive activity. Ricoeur's is a reflexive
philosophy based on the symbol (symbolische Reflexionsphilosophie). In it, rea-
son has become a mediating and transforming activity. Philosophy has been liber-
ated from the foundational tasks that have overburdened it for so long. Interpre-
tive reason mediates between determinism and freedom, continuity and
innovation, poetical and discursive expression, subject and world.
Manfred Frank
My portrait of Frank, who belongs to the generation of hermeneutic philosophers
after Gadamer and Ricoeur, concentrates on his two significant contributions to
contemporary hermeneutics. He "modernizes" hermeneutics by introducing a
structural model of meaning, and he insists on the irreducibility of the individual
subject, its uniqueness and the singularity of its sense-making productions.
14
Structuralism raised two problems for traditional hermeneutics. First, it in-
sisted on the systematicness of semiotic units. Signs owe their determinacy to the
relations they entertain with other units in a structure or system of relations. This
thesis denies that signs have shape or meaning singly entering into relations with
each other fully equipped with "Gestalt" and meaning. (We saw that Gadamer's
Bedeutungsereignisse ("meaning events"! also possessed this feature.) Second,
xxxii FOREWORD
structuralism has proclaimed the primacy of the signifier over the signified (the
meaning). According to this second thesis the status of meaning, if indeed it has
separate status at all, depends on the relations of or the rules for the signifier.
Meanings owe whatever determinacy and identity they have to the stratum of sig-
nifies. In sum, structuralism challenged the autonomy and supremacy of mean-
ing, and with it the primacy of understanding.
Frank's reply to the structuralist challenge is complex but, unlike Ricoeur's,
uncompromising. Frank concedes systematicness but resists the idea of a mean-
ingless signifier. He adopts the thesis that signs are indeed constituted in a sys-
tematic and historical surrounding and do not have individual existence and deter-
minacy prior to or independently from this environment. But, according to him,
far from dispensing with meaning, the systematic and contextual constitution of
the sign requires meaning. The category of meaning is necessary for the struc-
turalist program and indeed was held by Saussure to be part of his new science
of language.
But did structuralism not argue that meaningful activity is nothing but the
enactment of structures and that "meaning" is but the relational network within
the structure? If this is true then meaning (the signified) is indistinguishable from
the signifier, and is neither an independent category nor the product of a speaker's
sense-making activity. This, Frank replies (using Schleiermacher as his mouth-
piece), is not true. The structuralist reduction of meaning overlooks that a net-
work of relations among signifiers always occurs as context. The structure of the
structuralist, all-embracing and productive as it is to be, is never given other-
wise than in the form of some concrete context. Narrative structure, historical
episteme, systems of kinship, phonological or syntactical structure, are all acces-
sible only by appearing as concrete narratives, myths, tribes, languages, or bod-
ies of knowledge. The phenomenal and contextual element is at least epistemolog-
ically primary to the order or structural element it exhibits. Structure and context
are not two entities that exist separately and act upon each other. They only exist
jointly, and as mutually determining. This ontological feature might be called "in-
terexistence."
What is more, the identity of the order will in part depend on the concrete item
allegedly determined by the structure alone because the context always includes
the concrete, meaningful element itself. Therefore, signs are constituted by a dy-
namic interaction between a particular signifier and its context, not by a static and
Platonic structural agency intervening in reality. For the same reason, the inser-
tion of a signifier into a structure is the result of a meaningful activity, of a subject
or of the particular sign itself.
Let it be assumed that a language shows phonological and syntactical regulari-
ties. Were its speakers not to make the distinctions constitutive of the units of that
language, there would be nothing to be subsumed under the structural laws. But
we can read from the critical attitudes of the speakers themselves that they are
FOREWORD a xxxiii
observing certain rules, both about units and about combination. If those
speakers, as they sometimes do, stop distinguishing units or following rules, then
their "meaning-conferring" (Husserl) activity has changed the structure. This,
then, is the hermeneutic appropriation of structuralism: structure is constituted
by meaning, for it is given as meaning in and through context.
15
In addition to the structural component, Frank distinguishes yet another
dimension of meaning, following Schleiermacher. In the differentiated realm of
significances structural meaning calls for but one type of interpretive attitude, a
generalizing interpretation. We do, however, operate with "sense," too, an in-
dividual element in meaning that cannot be reduced to structural meaning. Sense
is irreducibly individual. It manifests itself as style, another individualizing con-
cept in Frank's hermeneutics. Sense and style call for an interpretive attitude
different from, but dialectically related to, the hermeneutic attitude focusing on
structure. Individualizing interpretations grasp what is singular, different, idi-
osyncratic in a text (or in whatever is the object of interpretation). Over and over
again, Frank's paradigm case for sense is Sartre's interpretation of Flaubert.
16
Sartre explores Flaubert, the individual author and his individual "oeuvre," in
their most minute detail, but not as separate individual meaning in addition to so-
cial, political, structural, or other meaning. Sense is not severable, not even ana-
lytically separable, from the structured and structuring environment in which it
occurs. And yet sense is also a singular response of a sense-making being in and
to that environment. The singularity of that response, lost in interpretations
uniquely concerned with the typical and functional aspects of the material, is
brought to light only when attention is paid to the particular options, the incon-
sistencies, the deviations from an established genre or from a paradigm that has
become oppressive. Sartre's enterprise is also proof of the feasibility of an in-
dividualizing interpretive focus and provides a methodological justification.
Frank is one of the few authors to have acknowledged that Sartre's late and much
neglected magnum opus is as serious an alternative to structuralism and poststruc-
turalism as it is to Gadamer's integrative hermeneutics and its social and political
obliviousness.
17
Frank, then, counters the structuralist negation of meaning with two theses.
Structure, he says, is sense and meaning. Or, more precisely, structure is that as-
pect of meaning that is turned toward order. For there is the other, the individual
aspect of meaning; and whatever has meaning also has sense. The uniqueness of
sensethis is Frank's second thesis can be detected in every concrete, meaning-
ful item, from the most ephemeral gesture to the pervading and enduring style
of an epoch. Applying his methodology of the individualizing gaze to the authors
he discusses in the present volume, Frank discovers interesting individual differ-
ences, between, for example, Foucault and Derrida, or Deleuze and Lyotard,
thus initiating a differential analysis of contemporary antirationalism.
18
So far, my presentation of Frank's hermeneutics has deliberately screened out
xxxiv FOREWORD
another aspect of his theory: his theory of subjectivity and of individuality. The
"question of the subject" has been a major bone of contention between antiration-
alism and rationalism. Consequently, Frank accords the largest part of What Is
Neostructuralism? to the topic of subjectivity and its treatment by Lacan, Der-
rida, and Deleuze (Lectures 12 through 24). He has also discussed the topic from
a different point of view in his latest book.
19
Frank's own theory of subjectivity
is still in the process of elaboration.
In its rejection of "the subject," antirationalism affirms two related theses. We
are not nor should we try to be unified individuals, reflecting on what we think,
do, and are, rationally controlling our actions. In short, the self-conscious and
self-controlled individual is neither a fact nor should it be a norm. Consequently,
antirationalism abandons the idea of a foundational role of subjectivity, the sub-
ject as ultimate ground of knowledge, locus of privileged access and certainty,
the subject as a separate ontological realm (mind, spirit) or as the end of a line
progressing from less to greater subjectivity. For antirationalists we are
nonunified plural beings, ignoring and deluding ourselves as to what we are and
do, moved and shaped by forces over which we have no control.
Hermeneutics has consistently opposed this Nietzschean position and has em-
phasized reflexive self-shaping. We have seen that both Gadamer's and Ricoeur's
theories exhibit this attitude. Frank continues along the same lines, but empha-
sizes subjectivity even more strongly than the two older authors do. His opposi-
tion to the Nietzschean position is based on a strong notion of self-knowledge or
self-acquaintance (Selbstvertrautheit). For Frank, as for his teacher, the neo-
idealist Dieter Henrich,
20
self-acquaintance is an original phenomenon evidenced
by our lived experience (Erleben). Therefore the theory does not need to argue
for the reality of the phenomenon, although it must give a theoretial account of
it. The fact that we are acquainted with ourselves is a certainty.
Self-acquaintance, as conceived by Henrich and Frank, lacks some of the more
problematic features of traditional self-consciousness. Being primordial, it does
not have access to its sources. It springs, as Henrich puts it, from sources it does
not control or master (aus unverfugbarem Grund).
21
It is also conceptually im-
penetrable. Consequently, Frank's self is neither its own author-if an author is
someone who knowingly and intentionally brings about a worknor the locus
and agent of order (transcendental agent, bearer of reflexive activity, source and
addressee of the law of freedom). Rather, the opposite is true: the self as in-
dividual is a constant threat to, an irregularity in, a disturbance and rupture of,
orders.
Why does a self-acquaintance that has lost its foundational functions remain
important? First, it serves in an account of individuality. Frank distinguishes be-
tween the subject, the person, and the individual without, however, offering us
more than summary accounts of the distinction. The subject is said to be
"general," the person "particular." But the individual is an "unrepresentable,
FOREWORD D xxxv
unique being" whose essence cannot be exhausted by concepts. A being pos-
sesses this uniqueness because it is related to itself and to itself only in the peculiar
mode of self-acquaintance, a familiarity with ourselves that is not cognitive, at
least not in the common sense of the term. In an additional thought that one would
like to be less abrupt and more elaborate,
23
that same individual is even claimed
to be the producer of its meaningful productions. An individual, Frank says, attri-
butes its concept to a totality of which it is an element. The concept is of the total-
ity. But it is also by an individual element included in that totality. The concept
thus shares in the uniqueness of its source. In addition, it has the generality of
conceptuality through application.
The attribution of the concept to the totality is the work of interpretation.
Again, Frank does not tell us why this is accomplished by the individual and not
(also?) by the subject or the person, or how the person and the subject manage
to be conceptual beings and results of interpretation, and who their conceiver is.
Both the subject and the person stand in need of symbolic realization. Do they
then have a worldview of their own, or are they merely conceptual projections?
Are they conceived by the individual or by the symbolic order? Frank has not yet
answered those questions. In addition, he also will need to tell us how an in-
dividual said to exist "without internal duplicate or double" externalizes and ob-
jectifies its inaccessible uniqueness into sense and style that are accessible
and amenable to interpretation. Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology have more elaborate theories on these issues.
The contours of Frank's design should have become visible. Subjectivity and
textuality are the two poles in a hermeneutics equally capable of taking a general
and an individual perspective. Frank is working out a theory of subjectivity not
based on self-transparency or unification, and therefore not open to the objections
raised by antirationalism. Hermeneutics is thus led away from the apparent choice
between individualizing and generalizing attitudes. Incidentally, Frank's strategy
is also a step toward a hermeneutic model of subjectivity. This is all the more im-
portant because hermeneutics focused on understanding, interpretation, and the
condition of symbolic man has tended to neglect traditional topics such as society,
ethics, and subjectivity. Important fields were thus left to its rationalist and antira-
tionalist rivals. As far as the textual pole is concerned, Frank has incorporated
a hermeneutically reinterpreted, structuralist semiotics into contemporary her-
meneutics. Hermeneutics overcomes its former dependence on and limitation by
antirational Heideggerian existentialism. In addition, Frank creates "elbow room"
for a greater variety of hermeneutic attitudes and a better position for hermeneu-
tics in the great doctrinal debates. A semiotically enlightened hermeneutics can
accommodate existential, structural, or other interpretive attitudes, among them
even deconstructive transactions with texts. Frank's presentations and discussions
in What Is Neostructuralism? bear witness to the scope of integration his her-
meneutics possesses.
xxxvi G FOREWORD
VI. Hermeneutic Rationality vs. Antirationalism
In this final section I would like to evaluate hermeneutic rationality more gener-
ally, before concluding with a staged debate between hermeneutics and decon-
struction on the crucial issue of interpretation.
Hermeneutic rationality is built upon the assumption that we are symbolic, that
is, sense-operating, beings. This assumption takes a rationalist turn when the the-
ory asserts-as the three hermeneuticists presented here do that interpretation
has cognitive status, that its claims can be supported or opposed by arguments
that relate back to the object to be interpreted for their support. But this is the
specialized rationality of interpretive sciences and activities, and yields only a
regional or partial rationalism.
Philosophical hermeneutics pursues the more ambitious and larger project of
explicating the rationality inherent in our symbolizing or understanding activity
itself. Does the fact that we are sense-making beings allow us rationally to con-
duct our lives? Can our symbolic condition serve as the basis of an epistemology
or an ethics? Is the way we model our world through categories and concepts a
cognition of that world? Are some interpretations of the world or of ourselves
more rational than others? Are there more and less rational ways to deal with our
own sense-making capacity? To some of these questions hermeneutics does in-
deed offer answers, although no systematic account of hermeneutic rationality has
been offered by one of the contemporary hermeneutics.
The normative side of the better-known hermeneutical doctrines is perhaps
best summed up by the imperative: understand yourself and what is relevant for
you; become as differentiated and unified an individual as you can. Most her-
meneuticists defend one or the other kind of individuality and of integratedness
as values of a rational personality. Rationality, as it emerges from evaluations
such as these, applies to self-shaping activities. Its model is the "work" (ergon,
Werk, oeuvre) and the making of works, the individual and integrated object or
result brought about by the craftsperson or the artist. It is to be noted that ergon
occupies several places in a rationalism that is, in senses other than Max Weber's,
a "work ethics." First and most simply, work is the result of an activity, its objecti-
fication into something different from the activity itself. When our activities result
in a character, a history, sets of experiences, then we ourselves become works,
the joint result of self-shaping and external conditions. As agents, we stand in two
relations to our works. We bring them about, or rather, participate in bringing
them about. And we encounter them as things to be dealt with. The hermeneutic
imperative could therefore also read: become a work (become your work); be a
good craftsperson.
In this version, the imperative includes prescriptions as to the ways and means
for realizing this ideal. There is thus a "secondary" hermeneutic rationality that
applies to the activity through which first-order rationality is acquired or mod-
FOREWORD xxxvii
ified. Here, the most important variable is how the individual appropriates the
cultural meanings of his or her environment, and how rational that appropriation
is. The ideal, again, is a reflexive, selective internalization of those meanings.
In the process of internalization the individual works through inherited meanings
and gives to them a unique form. To be sure, the individual's potential for innova-
tion is severely limited. Recognition of these limits, itself an interpretive and
reflexive task, is therefore an integral part of hermeneutic rationality. In this in-
stance, reflexivity assumes a limiting function, telling an agent what not to try
to achieve.
In another dimension of graded rationality there are more and there are less
genuine ways of pursuing the self-shaping activity. For Gadamer, for instance,
the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, the reflected self-insertion in one's own
tradition, is a positive value, whereas blindness toward, or even willful forgetful-
ness of, the tradition is negative. For Frank, on the other hand, "emancipation"
is a positive value, and emancipation encourages independence from traditional
values and the quest for values of one's own.
Still another dimension of rationality concerns the mode of interaction between
an agent and his or her tradition. Again, for Gadamer, the appropriation is most
successful when it is done in the spirit of a genuine overt dialogue. Ricoeur, on
the other hand, favors the model of psychoanalysis as a symbolic integration of
forces and meanings from beyond the realm of a self-shaping reason.
The reader of my summary may have felt, as I do, some misgivings about her-
meneutic rationality. When elevated to the rank of a universal philosophical the-
ory, hermeneutics begins to sound vague and arbitrary. How, for example, are
we going to lead a genuine dialogue? Gadamer tells us that a genuine dialogue
transforms all the participants, that the dialogue has unexpected results, etc.
Somehow, we recognize such a dialogue when we are engaged in it. But an appeal
to nonconceptual knowledge is not what we expect from a theory of reason.
Gadamer's dialogue, charitably interpreted, embodies the virtue of wisdom; yet
to a less well disposed reader its theoretical propagation may well appear to be
a bundle of beautiful but empty phrases.
It may be felt that I am being unjust to Gadamerian hermeneutics. After all,
does Gadamer not reject the theoretical claims I have attributed to him? Perhaps
he does, thinking that "truth" is properly located not in the theory but in the events
(Wahrheitsgescheheri). But in this case his hermeneutics moves even closer to-
ward antirationalism, this time toward the antitheoretical branch of the antiration-
alist family. To give another example: Why should we try to be integrated person-
alities who understand their own history and are well acquainted with their
cultural tradition? Why is an individual unique and ineffable? Traditional ration-
alism derived or justified personal policies for the subject by appealing to its no-
tion of reason. But with the foundational gesture contemporary hermeneutics has
given up the justificatory resources of a tradition now more cultivated as a cultural
xxxviii U FOREWORD
heritage than philosophically defended as a theory. Gadamerian hermeneutics
propagates the values of individuality or of an integrated personality without
justifying them. At their weaker moments, hermeneutic theories vacillate be-
tween a very general and not very interesting metaphilosophy about our condition
as sense-making beings, and highly educated, well-intentioned, but ultimately un-
directed and unorganized, collections of beautiful pieces from our philosophical
tradition.
Other problems have been mentioned before. In spite of claims to universality,
hermeneutics does not offer elaborate enough theories of its own concerning sub-
jectivity, society, and, most surprisingly, meaning, omissions that are all the
more conspicuous given that some of its rival theories address these topics. (Not
even Frank's structuralist account of meaning undertakes a systematic account of
its topic.) Nor does hermeneutics propose a theory of modernity to be compared
to those put forward by Luhmann, Habermas, and Lyotard, unless the theory as
a whole is taken as an implicit theory of modernity. In that case, however, it might
more adequately be called a symptom. Much of hermeneutics, particularly
Gadamer's influential version, presents our era in a pessimistic and highly nonra-
tional way. For the first time in the history of Western thought a period would
be characterized by not building a theory of its own discursively expressing its
self-understanding. It would not take upon itself the task of articulating its own
worldview in terms it invents for itself, be it in the form of system or of frag-
ments. Instead, for better or for worse, reflexive philosophy would be reduced
to the appropriation and modification of the tradition. This would also be the only
means for contemporary reason to maintain a reflexive stance toward itself. Theo-
retical insights are not pursued independently from the fact that they have been
thought before, and for their own sake. It is not surprising, then, that hermeneu-
tics emphasizes construction, unity of meaning, coherence, connectedness, and
continuity. The theory itself does not realize those values. Instead of offering the-
ories as responses to problems, hermeneutics all too often chooses the flight into
metaphilosophy or into a historicizing attitude toward philosophy. Is it not, in this
respect, an antirationalism camouflaged as rationalism, much closer to contem-
porary antirationalism than it likes to admit?
24
It may seem astounding, then, that the debate between hermeneutics and
antirationalism-to which I now turn-has been so lively.
25
At the surface, the
main point of contention is clear. The controversy is about language and interpre-
tation. The hermeneuticist advocates construction, cognition, coherence, and
unity of meaning; the antirationalist, deconstruction, undecidability, division,
and dissemination of meaning. And behind the surface of a debate about interpre-
tation our whole self-definition is at stake. Will we, shall we, define ourselves
through one or the other of the two interpretive attitudes?
The observations on interpretation I am going to offer at the end of this fore-
word are not intended to resolve the case between antirationalist denial and ration-
FOREWORD xxxix
alist affirmation of interpretation. The problems I want to raise are different:
What kind of a debate are the two parties involved in? How does the controversy
proceed? How do the opponents meet? On what grounds, if any, do rationalists
and antirationalists oppose each other? To what extent and about what do they
have an argument?
Hermeneutics takes constructive interpretation to be possible, and construc-
tion to have a cognitive aspect. We can have arguments about the adequacy of
an interpretation, because some interpretations fit their object better than others.
A strong position against these two theses construability of meaning and argua-
bility of interpretationappears to be this: construction of meaning, at least as
the hermeuticist understands the term, is impossible. If this position is true, it fol-
lows that constructive interpretation is not cognitive but some other kind of ac-
tivity, more akin perhaps to dreaming than to knowing. Hermeneutics dreams the
dream of the unity of meaning. Antirationalism "awakens hermeneutics from its
dogmatic slumber," not, of course, "to set hermeneutics on the secure path of
science."
On what grounds does antirationalism here presented in its Derridian or
deconstructionist version reject constructive interpretation?
26
What something
"means" is, in the technical language of Derrida, an "undecidable." Let me divide
the deconstructionist negation of constructible meaning into two lines of argu-
ment. The first, which I will now explore, is based upon the thesis that "meaning"
is determined by context, the very thesis Frank used against the structuralist
reduction of meaning. Deconstruction pushes the thesis to its radical conse-
quence. No meaning is complete before the last word of the context has been con-
sidered. But interpretations are contexts. As long as they continue to "supple-
ment" the text, truth claims about the text cannot be founded on the text.
Furthermore, the context is infinite. Therefore no definite meaning can ever be
ascertained.
In What Is Neostmcturalism? Frank replies to the "disseminatory" theory of
"meaning." (In its own understanding it is not a "theory of meaning," neither a
theory, nor of meaning.) Lecture 25 through the end contains a detailed scrutiny
of Derrida's views on interpretation. Frank here challenges the poststructuralist
skepticism that denies the assertibility of meaning. He argues that the justifiability
of interpretation is always relative. It is relative to an assumed unit to be inter-
preted, but also to a frame of interpretation, to perspectives, to interests, and so
on. Every interpretation constitutes itself as a cellular unit, setting up provisional
boundaries against the endlessness of other words, interests, etc., and thus stak-
ing out a little territory for itself. If this were impossible there would be nothing
determinate enough to be undecidable. Arguments about the adequacy of in-
terpretation function only within the confines of assumptions and presuppositions
thus made. Admittedly, neither the boundaries nor the territory are secure and
definite. But together they prevent the blankness of the infinite space of possible
xl n FOREWORD
alternatives, supplements, and disavowals to engulf the emerging interpretation.
It is this relative character of interpretation that deconstruction disregards when
it passes from the ultimate dependence of all interpretation on the totality of in-
terpretations to the conclusion that each and every interpretation is undecidable.
Deconstruction conflates the micro- and the macrocosm of interpretation. It may
be the case that ultimately every interpretation will or may be overcome by some
other interpretation refuting the first interpretation. But this is by no means an
argument against the feasibility of the particular interpretation in a certain en-
vironment, nor against "decidability" (here: arguability) in the confines of such
an environment. Is not deconstruction also staking out its own claim in presuppos-
ing that a text of departure "deconstructs itself, of its own"? If ever there is an
essentialist assumption, this is one. This initial assumption of deconstructive tex-
tuality will also determine what counts as an adequate "interpretation" and what
can be said in favor of it. Will a nondeconstructive interpretation undo a concrete
deconstructive transaction with the text? Will it be acceptable as an adequate
transaction with the text of origin?
Frank's reply to the radical skepticism denying the very possibility of con-
trolled interpretation is, then, to grant the premise that all meaning is constituted
in (and by) the great chain of meaning, but to reject the conclusion of radical un-
decidability. Against the radical relativism of deconstruction he affirms the rela-
tive controllability of interpretive reconstruction. I think Frank's point is well
taken.
Deconstructionist skepticism with regard to constructive interpretation may be
based on a more radical thought. This time, the antirationalist argues from the
textual fabric of the piece to be interpreted itself. Briefly, the argument asserts
that whenever we think we have grasped a meaning of a text, then the same text
can also be read as meaning something else, and the two "meanings" are incom-
patible. A text, or whatever is meaningful, does indeed have meaning effects. But
they do not obey any rule, and they fall into no order. The semiotic object will,
as it were, license one meaning and its opposite (some meaning incompatible with
the first). Incoherence is not a particular meaning, dwelling in the text side by
side with coherent meanings, to be found and spelled out. Neither is incoherence
a quality of some texts but not of others. Incoherence is the "nature" of textuality
or semioticity itself. For a text, it is impossible not to be inconsistent.
This argument raises difficulties of a new kind. As these difficulties are
paradigmatic of the more general problems that beset a debate between rational-
ism and antirationalism, I will try to spell them out here. Indeed, they will turn
out to prevent the argument from being an argument, at least in the usual sense
of that term.
For how is the hermeneuticist going to deal with a thesis that states that his
enterprise is impossible and appeals to the necessary incoherence of textuality for
support? His task looks simple enough. The hermeneutic opponent gives a coun-
FOREWORD xli
terexample. He offers a piece of coherent and constructive interpretation that is
evidence for the possibility of his favored interpretive attitude. At this point, the
antirationalist opponent has to make a decision. If he wants to continue arguing
that a "coherentist" interpretation is impossible, he will either have to show that
the interpretation of the counterexample is only apparently constructive, but
really incoherent, or that it is not an account of the "meaning" of the object at all.
27
Both strategies, however, present self-defeating problems to the antirationalist.
Not only does he need to interpret the interpretation and the work in his argument.
How else could he say that the apparently "coherent" interpretation is really inco-
herent or that it fails to do justice to the piece? His own interpretation is also a
constructive text in its own right and an interpretation in a minimal sense. The
antirationalist runs into this difficulty because, if he wants to argue about the ex-
ample, he must at least say what he thinks the meaning of a text is not. In addition,
he must "understand" the interpretation under attack, and he needs to construe its
meaning, again at least up to the point where he is able to say that the allegedly
constructive interpretation is an inadequate transaction with the original text.
Meanings must be assertible and assessable if all this is to take place.
By now it will have become obvious that the debate has been engaged in terms
favorable to the hermeneutic position. The antirationalist opponent will conse-
quently try to shift the controversy to a terrain more favorable to his cause. The
logical structure of the debate will further highlight the difficulty. "Possibility"
and "impossibility" of constructive interpretation are universal theses. The her-
meneuticist has the advantage of being able to argue for possibility from an exam-
ple of constructive interpretation. But the deconstructionist opponent has the dis-
advantage that he can be completely successful in his argument against the
example, and still does not win his case against the hermeneuticist. There will
always be other examples.
Therefore, the antirationalist stands a much better chance if he engages in the
debate in general terms. He is also well equipped to do so, for he disposes of a
theory of language or of texts saying that the virtual objects of interpretation are
incoherent and unconstruable. From this point on, the argument hinges on the
plausibility of the theory. I refer the reader to the presentation in What Is Neo-
structuralism?
2
* Let it be granted that there is such a theory. Then the debate has
indeed changed. It has shifted from the example to the plausibility of the decon-
structionist theory. Are texts (in general) "undecidables"? Or are they, for exam-
ple, pictures of fictionally possible worlds, and thus describable? The roles be-
tween the opposing sides are now reversed. At this point, the hermeneutic
opponent faces a choice. On the one hand, he can choose to argue against the the-
ory that denounces his favored kind of interpretation. Gadamer, for instance, has
invoked a consensual element in understanding as a general presupposition that
everyone, including antirationalists, must make.
29
In his reply Derrida has com-
pared Gadamer's will to understand to Kant's "good will," burdening Gadamer
xlii LJ FOREWORD
with normative assumptions of an ethical kind. Gadamer, of course, did not in-
tend to appeal to a rational will in a Kantian sense, but only to a will that wants
to understand. Clearly, wanting to understand what somebody says and wanting
to submit to the categorical imperative (or some other ethical standard) are not
the same thing. Gadamer is convinced that his will to understand does not depend
on a particular norm of any kind, that there simply is no alternative to willing to
understand, short of madness or intentional "misunderstanding" (which seems to
be impossible). But Derrida may have wanted to illustrate just this: from the an-
tirationalist point of view, construction of meaning is the following of a particular
norm, only gradually different from a will that has been subjected to the categori-
cal imperative. For Gadamer, that same will to understand is a transcendental and
nonprescriptive condition of communication in general. Clearly, the debate
draws arguments from premises or assumptions not shared by the adversary.
Each side thinks the other does, must, or ought to share those premises, or that
arguability begins only after certain rules (or nonrules) have been secured. Yet
as a matter of fact, the other party does not think this is the case. The theoretical
debate is thus deadlocked. Its participants do not have consensus, either about as-
sumptions or about meanings of fundamental terms. In that situation, an appeal
to "understanding" or to grasping each other's meanings is futile because it is part
of the position under attack. For each side can maintain its premises only as long
as it does not make the other's assumptions, or use its own terms as the other does.
This is not uncommon in cases of Grundlagenstreit, controversies about founda-
tions or fundamentals in which everything, including the basics, is at stake.
31
Once the hermeneuticist comes to the conclusion just sketched, he may
remember that he has another option still. Did the trouble not start when he tried
to refute the thesis that constructive interpretation is impossible on theoretical
grounds? What if instead he asked what support the deconstructionist has for his
theory? But the same situation will recur. The debate will again and very soon
reach premises that cannot be referred to further shared premises or higher-level
arguments. The deadlock thus seems complete. The conclusion appears inevita-
ble: the controversy is not an argument. It has not secured the minimal consensus
that makes arguments possible. This conclusion is not altogether surprising in a
debate between rationalists and antirationalists, at least as long as each side per-
sists in a totalizing attitude. After all, the two camps do not share minimal ra-
tionality.
It may seem that we have reached a point where the controversy dissolves into
resigned tolerance. Let each party have it its way. This conclusion is, however,
premature. The general theories may indeed not be decidable for lack of shared
assumptions. But we have stated arguability in our discussion of examples. It is
remarkable that deconstructionist and hermeneutic attitudes are genuinely con-
troversial on a level of less ambitious and less general theorizing. Each side, then,
chooses examples. In order to reach the less universal and more open type of
FOREWORD G xliii
generality that resides in exemplarity, each side tries to make its case as exem-
plary as possible. One may wonder, though, what the status of an example can
be in the new debate. How should we be able to do through examples what we
could not do with the theories themselves? Let the rationalist use his representa-
tionalist ideas in choosing and interpreting his examples. The deconstructionist
will do the opposite. What is new and different from the previous debate is that
now theories and examples are inextricably entangled. The theory, "for exam-
ple," Ricoeur's or Derrida's theory of textuality, is both a presupposition of an
interpretation and is meant to receive support from that interpretation, provided
the theory fares well when applied to the particular text. This also holds for the
antirationalist, who uses his disseminatory idea of textuality both as a guiding
principle and as something to be shown to be successful. Within its relatively pro-
tected area each interpretive attitude may be successful with its own choice of ex-
amples. The two attitudes still encounter and oppose each other by claiming ex-
emplarity of their respective interpretations. Within limits difficult to generalize,
they can still argue whether one interpretation is more adequate or more success-
ful than the other.
But as I see the situation, rationalism and antirationalism now oppose each
other as rational policies of interpretation, not as universal theories in the ration-
alist sense of theory.
32
These policies are "rational" or rationalizable to the extent
they aspire to exemplarity of their interpretive results. Beyond the limits of ra-
tionalizability, the two attitudes are not in discursive conflict with each other but
rather are beliefs and practices that coexist side by side unless they are seized by
totalizing desires.
Another thought leads to the same result. Hermeneutics and antirationalism
jointly reject the foundational "gesture" of our philosophical tradition. This "ges-
ture" fed the conviction that a theory that had been grounded was therefore enti-
tled to reject other theories, provided they said something different on the same
subject matter. The idea of a foundation helped to provide the homogeneous space
in which all theories could meet and confront each other. When the idea of an
ultimate foundation is abandoned, the many theories may continue to compete for
general adoption, but none of them provides the means to refute the other, unless
they share a sufficient basis of common assumptions. This is the historical and
intellectual situation in which hermeneutics and antirationalism meet. Both try to
establish their credentials by relating to the tradition, each in their own way, and
by the high-level rhetoric of their appeals and examples. By the same token they
cease to be theories that can criticize each other. I wonder what will become of
the "will to power" that drives their controversies once they recognize that they
do not possess the means to give a theoretical explanation of their conflict.
In conclusion, I see Frank's What Is Neostructuralism? as a hermeneutic state-
ment in the ongoing debate between contemporary rationalism and antirational-
ism. In that debate theoretical wills clash and turn their powers of persuasion to-
xliv D FOREWORD
ward the reader. Frank follows a rationalist strategy of persuading the readers of
the well-foundedness of his own attitude by reconstructing the theories and argu-
ments of his adversaries and by attending to those of their weaknesses to which
he is most sensitive: the possibility of interpretation, the value of the individual,
the connection with our tradition. He thus practices the dialogue hermeneutic the-
ory defends.
Translators' Note
A translation is never anything more or anything less than a graphic (or
phonic) record of an interpretation. Interpretations, for their part, are always ap-
proximations and cannot lay claim to absolute objectivity. Still, as translators, we
set ourselves the task of working toward a "faithful" translation of Manfred
Frank's text, understanding fully the limitations involved. Derrida has claimed
that translation should always be "the transformation of one language by another."
In this sense, we hope that Frank's German has transformed our English text in
its own characteristic way. His text has, at any rate, constantly challenged ours,
and if we have been equal to this challenge in most instances, then we will con-
sider our goal achieved.
There are, aside from the obvious general problems involved in rendering
German philosophical discourse in English, some problems specific to this text
itself. The most significant of these is Frank's reliance on and employment of
numerous subdiscourses of contemporary philosophy. Although schooled in the
hermeneutica language of Heidegger and Gadamer, Frank also incorporates the
characteristic terminology of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and neostructural-
ism (as he calls it), phenomenology, romantic idealist philosophy, as well as the
language of analytical philosophy. These discourses are not always compatible
with one another regarding the signification attributed to certain expressions, and
in such cases we have tried to adjust our renderings of the terms according to the
given context. The most prominent example of this problem is manifest in the
translation of the words bedeuten/Bedeutung, Sinn, meinen/Meinung. Unless
xlvi .""; TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
otherwise indicated, we have rendered Sinn and Bedeutung, in the manner rele-
vant to semiology, as "meaning" and "signification," respectively. However, in
the context of analytical philosophy, Sinn must be translated as "sense," and Be-
deutung as "meaning" (whereby the rendering of the Fregean distinction between
Sinn and Bedeutung as "sense" and "reference" must be kept in mind). By the same
token, in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, Sinn and Bedeutung are used
almost interchangeably, and the third pair of terms, meinen/Meinung, comes into
play. We have, as a rule, translated these expressions as "to intend" and "inten-
tion," in order to emphasize the active sense of the intending of meaning.
The other word complex that presents special problems is that connected with
the various meanings of the concept of representation. The latinate verb reprsen-
tieren commonly is employed to evoke the notion of re-presencing, and we have
translated it thus in such instances. The word Stellvertreter, which means
representative in the sense of proxy, we have chosen to render as "placeholder."
The words darstellen/Darstellung, which refer to representation in the aesthetic
sense, we have translated as "to portray7"portrayal."
We are aware that our translation stands in a tradition, and we have sought
wherever possible to pay this tradition its due respect. This means that we have
followed the established conventions for translating German philosophical con-
cepts. By way of example, Sein is always rendered as "Being," Seiend'ds "being."
We have consulted and cited the standard translations of the German texts quoted
by Frank. In addition, we have relied on the standard English translations of key
phrases from the French structuralists and neostructuralists. As a result, of
course, the polyphony of voices already inherent in Frank's original has been mul-
tiplied by these further voices in our English text.
For the sake of readability, we have tried to keep our interruptions of the text
to a minimum. Where we thought it necessary or helpful, we have supplied the
German word or phrase in parentheses. Notes added by us are prefixed with the
abbreviation TN.
Finally, this translation has been a communal and shared enterprise in the
very best sense. It is a product of cooperation, dialogue, mutual respect, and
agreement.
Abbreviations
AdS Michel Foucault, L'Archologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard,
1969).
AK Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.
M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1971).
AO Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. He-
len R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem (New York:
Viking Press, 1977).
BN Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie
and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
CFS Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure
CGL Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans.
Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
CM Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1960).
Coll P Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hart-
stone and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1953).
Diss Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
DR Gilles Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition (Paris: PUF, 1968).
xlviii ABBREVIATIONS
Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1977).
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, Edi-
tion critique, d. Rudolf Engler, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harras-
sowitz, 1967-74).
Jean-Paul Sartre, LEtre et le nant: Essai d'ontologie ph-
nomnologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Smtliche Werke, d. I. H. Fichte
(Berlin: Veit, 1845-46).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, d.
Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977).
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phe-
nomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Mac-
millan, 1931).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Lldiot de la famille, 3 vols. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1971-72).
Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc abc . . .," trans. Samuel
Weber, Glyph 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1977), pp. 162-254.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. W.
H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols. (New York: Mac-
millan, 1929).
Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969).
Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une Archologie
des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Milles Plateaux (Paris:
Minuit, 1980).
Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard,
1971).
Jacques Derrida, "Introduction," Edmund Husserl s Origin of
Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey, ed. David B. Allison
(Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978).
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of
the Human Sciences (New York: Random House [Vintage
Books], 1970).
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
ABBREVIATIONS il
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).
Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koesten-
baum (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964).
John Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Der-
rida," Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 189-208.
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans.
Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Claude Lvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire
Jacobson and Brook Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Double-
day, 1967).
Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, vol. 1 of In-
troduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen
Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Naked Man, vol. 4 of Introduction
to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weight-
man (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays
on HusserVs Theory of Signs (Northwestern University
Press, 1973).
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Samtliche Schriften, ed.
K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-61).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thorie Werkausgabe, ed.
K. M. Michel and E. Moldenhauer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1968ff.).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York:
Crossroad, 1975).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
trans, and ed. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1960).
Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phnomne: Introduction au
problme du signe dans la phnomnologie de Husserl
(Paris: PUF, 1967).
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bnden, ed. Karl
Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Macmillan, 1909ff.).
What Is Neostructuralism?
Lecture 1
If some fifteen years ago someone had with some gravity concluded that the so-
called German-French friendship was nothing more than the sentimental glori-
fication of an alliance whose sole purpose was economic-political advantage, and
that this friendship had few consequences on the profounder level of intercultural
dialogue, then this lament would not have made much of an impression in philo-
sophical circles characterized by self-satisfaction. The ship of German philoso-
phy was heading full-sail in the direction of hermeneutics and Critical Theory,
both of which were supported at that time by the student revolts. It was believed
that the concession to internationalism had been made by means of what in fact
was no small integration of Anglo-Saxon positions. What need was there to con-
cern oneself with the French?
To be sure, the situation was not much different in French philosophy. Here
there began, almost simultaneously with the Paris May revolts, the joyous ascent
of neostructuralism, which promised to be a stable fashion for at least a decade
and was not in need of foreign impulses as sources of new energy.
Today this situation is beginning to change markedly. Current historical condi-
tions are not so advantageous to hermeneutic-critical theory as they were ten
years ago. The falling star of this theory syndrome, coupled with the incalculable
signs that analytical philosophy inspired by Anglo-Saxon models has exhausted
its resources, has created conditions under which sections of the younger genera-
tion in particular in Germany are beginning to direct their gaze with much more
curiosity than previously across the border into France.
A corresponding development appears to be beginning in France today. The
4 LECTURE 1
interpretive potentials of a philosophy that, as the latest movement, followed first
on the heels of existentialism, then on those of classical structuralism, seem to
be in a state of decline. Intellectual crises are always favorable catalysts for open-
ness to things foreign, to such things, for example, as the philosophy that has been
produced since the Second World War outre-Rhin and that has been ignored-
toute compte faitin France. The first halting discussions with hermeneutics and
with Critical Theory have begun.
These lectures, devoted to the question "What Is Neostructuraiism?" are moti-
vated by this situation. They seek to contribute to a reawakening of Central Euro-
pean philosophy, to its engagement for the universal, achieving this, however,
not merely in the form of postulates that are received in the native country and
formulated in the native language. Furthermore, this engagement should not sim-
ply be expressed in the form of a historical reconstruction that explains after the
fact what in the time of the philosophers themselves was no transnational subject
matter. No, already today we want to make the effort to think within our own age
and to write for our contemporaries for our contemporaries, but not solely for
our compatriots, and certainly not on the impaired basis of our own national
educational tradition.
Of course, one cannot escape this educational tradition merely by declaring
one's goodwill: it must become a part of the dialogue that we wish to initiate with
contemporary French philosophy, but only to the extent that a certain point of
departure is indispensable and cannot be passed over if one wishes to confront
from one's own position something foreign. This position itself, however, is by
no means a goal. The goal we set for ourselves here, rather, is expanding the
horizons of both partners in this dialogue, that of hermeneutics as well as that of
neostructuraiism.
Thus my lectures are grounded in a perspective schooled in hermeneutics;
however, their gaze is directed at the contemporary philosophy of France. That
is why I do not simply want to present an introduction to this foreign subject mat-
ter with a German audience in mind; rather, I am seeking a true dialogue with
my colleagues in France. Actually being addressed are those French philosophers
who would like to discover how what they formulate and think appears from the
estranging perspective-and often through the critique-of contemporary her-
meneutics. Hermeneutics, for its part, wishes to be informed about those aspects
of its formulations that cannot stand up to the criticism of the French.
Those who seek a dialogue with others especially with interlocutors who
speak a different languageare well advised to introduce themselves at the onset.
Introducing oneself implies in this instance also presenting the perspective and
the position on the basis of which the dialogue is sought. Both of these-
perspective and position are themselves acquisitions that have been shaped in
a specific educational context.
From 1964 to 1971 I studied philosophy as well as German and English at the
LECTURE 1 5
universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. I received my most profound impressions
as a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer: his seminars pointed me in the direction
of philosophical hermeneutics, i.e., to a set of issues that, as the French (occa-
sionally) know, dominated the philosophical scene in West Germany so com-
pletely that someday it will probably be characterized as the specific German con-
tribution to postwar philosophy. Although inspired neither by Heidegger nor by
Gadamer with a particularly progressive spirit, hermeneutics nevertheless pos-
sessed critical, indeed, even Utopian potentials that exerted a powerful influence
on the generation of student protesters, to which I also belong, and whose watch-
word in Germany was Hinterfragen, critical questioning. Critical questioning
means reminding interpretations, orders, institutions of their traditions and hence
of their alterability; reminding them, moreover, of the purely hypothetical nature
of their existence; shattering their indigenous and perhaps illegitimate existence
by demanding that they justify themselves on the basis of reason, in order that
they might pass through this critique purified and renewed. The specific her-
meneutical theory that made this intellectual and moral-political attitude into a
fundamental political position was the so-called Kritische Thorie of the later
Frankfurt School. Its main representative, Jurgen Habermas, exerted scarcely
less, if yet more moderate influence on the remonstrating university students in
West Germany than Sartre did on their French counterparts (in addition, Haber-
mas's ideology-critical approach agrees with that of Sartre on many points).
You must be aware that in Germany around the year 1968 the drive of the
young people to come to terms critically with the tradition of their country (i.e.,
of their parents) was livelier and more urgent than in almost any other nation in
Europe. This was quite natural since it appeared to this generation to be abso-
lutely essential for intellectual and moraland not merely economic survival
that not simply a new morality, but, in fact, any morality whatsoever should be
put up against the amorality of the Nazi generation. Yet the most powerful philo-
sophical movement with which we (at the time) younger people could connect,
namely, the existential ontology of Martin Heidegger, was, to the extent that it
was not compromised by its concessions to the Nazi dictatorship, damaged in our
consciousness at the very least by its "incapacity for sorrow." In place of a univer-
sal questioning of the history of metaphysics we would above all have been in-
terested to find out how Heidegger would approach philosophically the history
of fascism. On this topic, however, he could utter only commonplaces and
excuses.
On the other hand, it could not be overlooked that even the Left sympathized
with certain aspects of Heideggerian ontology: its emphasis on freedom and
simultaneously on the relative dependence of Dasein on given conditions; its radi-
cal historicism; its critique of metaphysics, etc. Thus there were some lines of
connection that led from existential-ontological hermeneutics to the Critical The-
ory of society; however, these lines could only be drawn to the extent that one
6 U LECTURE 1
was willing to allow Heidegger's philosophical foundations to undergo critical re-
vision. Here one had to carry out what the French neostructuralists call decon-
struction: a tearing-down of the philosophical system and its reconstruction on
rearranged foundations. Under such prerequisites Germany experienced some
lively deconstruction work in the sixties and seventies: Heidegger's ontology was
freed from its national restrictions; analytical positions of Anglo-Saxon authors
(or of German authors who had emigrated to Anglo-Saxon territory) were
brought into play; the thesis of the repression of Being was critically tested on
the example of German idealism, of Marx and of Nietzsche; Heidegger's her-
meneutics was rewritten both in the spirit of pragmatism (from Peirce to Wittgen-
stein and Searle) and in the spirit of a critical theory of society.
No one is ever asked under what conditions in which nation, in which class,
at what timehe wants to be brought into the world; no one can escape socializa-
tion and culturalization by the currently ruling "order of discourse." In this sense
the formation of academic philosophy in the sixties and, in a certain sense, the
discourse of existential ontology have been formative for me. But "formative" is
not the same as "determining"; and it would be just as false as it would be danger-
ous to conclude from the precedence of "discourse" over concrete speech, as
Heidegger and numerous other linguistic-philosophical determinists of various
shades do, that "language itself speaks," and that we are that which is spoken by
it. On the contrary, language is no fate; it is spoken by us and we are able to criti-
cally "question" it at any time. The law of language has the existential status of
a mere virtuality: it has an imperative, but no determinative, forcing influence
on individual language usage. Precisely this is the fundamental idea of hermeneu-
tics, namely, that symbolic orders, as opposed to natural laws, are founded in in-
terpretations; hence they can lay claim only to a hypothetical existence, they can
be transformed and transgressed by new projections of meaning. In the words of
the great Geneva linguist: "In relation to the community [the law of language] is
absolutely precarious: nothing guarantees its stability; this order is at the mercy
of the future. . . . An act of (individual) interpretation, which is active, is (al-
ways) necessary."
1
With this I have touched on the problem that has concerned me considerably
(however, not solely) since that time: how can one, on the one hand, do justice
to the fundamental fact that meaning, significance, and intention the semantic
foundations of every consciousness can form themselves only in a language, in
a social, cultural, and economic order (in a structure)? How can one, on the other
hand, redeem the fundamental idea of modern humanism that links the dignity
of human beings with their use of freedom, and which cannot tolerate that one
morally applaud the factual threatening of human subjectivity by the totalitarian-
ism of systems of rules and social codes?
I have formulated these two conflicting positions in such a way that you may
recognize immediately what I am thinking about. The point of view of the ines-
LECTURE 1 D 7
capability of structure is represented above all in the France of the sixties and,
in somewhat looser form, that of the seventies; in contrast to this, the so-called
transcendental hermeneutics of Germany insists on the theory-constitutive role of
subjectivity as the primary factor in every formation, interpretation, and altera-
tion of meaning.
The problem was and is that almost no dialogue exists between these two
positions unless one were inclined to attribute to the superficial and narrow-
minded polemics on both sides (or for that matter the imitation of French style
by some of its German fans who have no standpoint of their own) the honor of
such an appellation. My impression was and still is that while hermeneutics has
not adequately measured the depth of the structuralist argument against the cen-
trality of the subject, neither has structuralism/neostructuralism questioned down
to the roots of a solid theory of the subject. The "decentering of the subject" is
grounded just as superficially in France as a theory of the dialectics of structure
and attribution of meaning is in Germany.
The more I reflected on this version of a conflict of methods, the more urgent,
but also promising, appeared the question of its intellectual-historical genesis.
This was my initial reflection: can one reconstruct a position in the history of
modern European philosophy in which what today is broken apart was conceived
as two sides of an integral and dialectical movement? This reflection was based
on two concomitant convictions. The first was that history does not always do us
the favor of moving in the direction of progress (sometimes previous standards
are lost or forgotten, as, above all, recent German history has taught). The second
conviction was that until the consummation of the European Enlightenment in the
thought of idealism, the history of philosophy was still represented as a transna-
tional unity and continuity. Only with the historization of thought-with the lin-
guistic turn since Herder and Humboldt-could transnational and transhistorical
"reason" be reinterpreted as an "image of the world" inscribed in a linguistic or-
der. Reason, relativized into the linguistic world image of a people, was ipso facto
nationalized: it disappeared behind the "national spirit" of a culture. Stated in an
oversimplified manner, the result of this was a split of reason: on the one hand,
the so-called Weltanschauungsphilosophie, which historicized all claims to valid-
ity by pointing to the cultural, social, or even national genesis of assertions; on
the other side, history-blind and positivistic scientism in all its variations. To ap-
ply this now to the conflict of methods in the present day: the fatherlands of Euro-
pean civilization are only unified when scientistic claims to knowledge are being
discussed, i.e., in all questions concerning technological expediency and natural-
scientific truths. On the other hand, the national split in the unity of reason persists
in the realm of the human sciences under the influence of classical philosophy
(i.e., of philosophy that is not satisfied with being merely philosophy of science).
This division of reason manifests itself currently in Central Europe in the conflict
8 Q LECTURE 1
between structuralist and hermeneutical "knowledge interests," as Habermas has
called them.
My hypothesis, once again, is that this conflict can be resolved only if one suc-
ceeds in reconstructing the history within which it evolved. This history, how-
ever, is the history of the destruction of reason's claim to universality under the
blows of "historical consciousness." As a result of this split, among other things,
scientistic and hermeneutical, but also structuralist and hermeneutical options
could become antagonistic. This antagonism, in my opinion, led to an alarming
alienation of German and French philosophy. The remedy that occurred to me
is expressed in the incantation from Parsifal: "Only the lance that opened the
wound can also close it." In other words, one must therapeutically confront this
dissolution of the unity of philosophical and human-scientific discourse with its
originary conditions, i.e., with the age of romanticism. For example, it is
scarcely recognized, but nonetheless true, that the concept of "structure" in its
specifically modern and, if you will, specifically French application was written
into the terminology of our discipline by a theoretician of early romanticism: the
theologian, philosopher, and philologist Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleier-
macher understood under the word "structure" a system of relations among ele-
ments, as he expressed it, whereby each element derives its meaning through une-
quivocal differentiation from all other elements. According to Schleiermacher,
this process of differentiation constitutes not only orders such as that of language,
but also cultural, social, economic, and juridical orders; in short, all discursive
regulations that mediate intersubjective communication. Although my descrip-
tion is rather superficial, you must sense that it was precisely these aspects that
were rediscovered and reworked with indubitably more appropriate tools by
modern linguistics and discourse analysis in France based on Saussure.
What is surprising and almost unbelievable is that Schleiermacher has sur-
vived exclusively as the founder of a "hermeneutics of empathy" {EinfUhlungsher-
meneutik), which overtaxes the subjective aspect of interpretation to the disadvan-
tage of structural and historical aspects of that which was to be understood. To
his immediate disciples the structural interpretation was still known; for Simmel,
Heidegger, Bultmann, Ricoeur, and especially for Gadamer and his school, this
was almost totally forgotten. Under the deprecative name "romantic hermeneu-
tics," Schleiermacher's approach became the epitome of an unserious, intuitive,
and history-blind model of discourse analysis and textual understanding with
whose fictive intention existential hermeneutics shares only an inimicalness to
thorough structuring, and the belief in the autonomy of understanding with regard
to any form of methodological disciplining.
Unfortunately, Gadamer's opprobation of Schleiermacher and the resulting al-
ternative concept of an "effective-historical hermeneutics" were initially accepted
all over, both in philosophy and in the practices of literary criticism. Even the
opponents of hermeneutics took over the critique of Schleiermacher. Thus began
LECTURE 1 9
the aforementioned nationalization and splitting of methods so that structural
interpretation itself originally a romantic enterprise was only at home in
France, and transcendental hermeneutics, with the exception of Sartre and
Ricoeur, only in Germany. At Franco-German conferences one experiences yet
today, as structuralism has been accepted by a third generation of thinkers, an
alarming amount of mutual mistrust, insupportable imputations, and massive un-
willingness to understand. Philosophy's claim to universality continues to exist,
but it is fractured by the particularistic praxis of the philosophers themselves. On
both sides the will for consensus is lacking.
At precisely this point I would like to step outside this critical description and
present a positive counterproposal. At the center of this proposal stands the di-
alectical concept of the "singular universal" (Sartre) or of the "individual univer-
sal" (Schleiermacher). How I apply this concept and to what extent I have faith
in its ability to overcome the aporia of the contemporary antagonism, that is what
I would like to present in an increasingly concrete manner over the course of this
lecture series. My lectures will begin with a broadly sketched tour through that
which I call neostructuralism, that is, the philosophical-aesthetic position that fol-
lowed classical structuralism in France. I will begin by introducing this theory
in general and highlighting its argumentative strengths. At those points, however,
where the premises of this position produce irresolvable aporias, I will attempt
a hermeneutical counterapproach that will not only reveal my own position, but
will also present objections against hermeneutics as well. In this manner I hope
to introduce in a characteristic way a central aspect of my philosophical position.
At the same time I wish to lay a foundation for what I want to work out and discuss
in the course of these lectures: an archaeology of the individual and a theory of
self-consciousness and free praxis of the sort that will stand up to the objections
both of structuralism and of analytic philosophy, and which will reconquer for
contemporary philosophical discourse one of, if not the, central theme of modern
metaphysics in deconstructed form.
Indeed, the "spiritual situation of the age" seems to me to demand that we give
some thought to a new definition of subjectivity and of individuality (which are
not one and the same).
2
Both terms denote concepts that are under attack in con-
temporary France and are defended perhaps too naively in contemporary Ger-
many. The fact that the time is unfavorably disposed to the subject does not prove
anything against its truth (in Hegel's sense). Philosophyas long as it understands
itself morally must fundamentally guard itself against merely reducing, in the
attitude of a "eunuchlike neutrality" (as Droysen called it), the existent to concepts
without saying a word about the legitimacy of the process itself. To be sure, the
existence of individuality appears threatened, indeed, undetectable in a world that
is becoming uniform and totalitarian. It is also true that philosophy must explain
and make understandable that process in whose development subjectivity was lost
from view. But it is one thing to explain the death of subjectivity as a result of
10 LECTURE 1
the course of the world, and another thing altogether to greet it with applause,
as Foucault does. The factual is not already the true; a "happy positivism" that
dissolves this difference mimics, consciously or not, the dominating power. It is
true that the individual disappears more and more in the "code" (of the state, of
bureaucracy, of the social machine, of all varieties of discourse)-, which has be-
come autonomous. And it is also correct that a dead subject emits no more cries
of pain. However, that interpretation that would like to extract a scientific-
historical perspective from the silence of the subject, and which culminates in the
gay affirmation of a subjectless and reified machine ( la Deleuze and Guattari),
appears to me to be cynical. A neutral description of the crisis of the subject as
a factual occurrence is not only nonmoral (in the sense of a standpoint "beyond
good and evil," i.e., of an extramoral cognitive position that must be allowed at
all times); it is rather amoral, for it raises that which is to the measure of that
which should be. In this sense, it seems to me, philosophy must always opt for
the nonexistent; it must engage itself contractually; it must defy reality while
recognizing it. The dignity of philosophy always consisted in the fact that it en-
gaged itself for the nonexistent, for it has always been what not (yet) is, with a
foresight toward which what is attains its meaning and the ground of its Being
(Seinsgrund). To use up this reserve of irreality would mean not only strangling
the human subject in the mesh of the structural net but also putting an end to phi-
losophy, which would then coincide with positivism and assimilate itself com-
pletely to the reified world. In a word, it may be true that the scientific and techni-
cal world is not in need of the memory of the dignity of the individual subject
in order to survive; indeed, it functions perhaps even better without a philosophy
that continually forces upon it a bothersome memory. But the world was always
least problematic without human beings; perhaps nature is at present venturing
the crucial steps-through the human beings who make themselves its tools-
necessary for eliminating the human being forever and eradicating that name
from its registry. However, it must be doubted whether, as some contemporaries
believe, it is possible to "think" more authentically "in the void of the disappear-
ance of man" than in the fullness of its lost past, at least as long as we are unsuc-
cessful at actually avoiding a theory of consciousness and of praxis that is oriented
toward the concept of the subject. Such an alternative theory does not appear to
me to be in sight for the present. Therefore I recommend that the diagnostic
power of the talk about the death of the subject be taken seriously and made ana-
lytically fruitful without meanwhile lapsing into the opposite extreme of applaud-
ing the death of the subject on a moral level.
The question about the mode of Being of subjectivity and of individuality is,
however, by no means simply a moral one. I am convinced that neither structural-
ism nor neostructuralism nor, for that matter, any other form of systems theory
has truly succeeded in explaining the processes of signification and of the altera-
tion of signification without relying explicitly or implicitly on the category of the
LECTURE 1 a 11
individual. Even the reified statement "Language speaks itself," or even the
systems-theoretical statement about the "self-reflexivity of systems," has to em-
ploy reflexive pronouns that then hypostatize what was earlier considered a
characteristic of the speaking subject as a characteristic of language or of the sys-
tem itself. The subject that is crossed out in the position of the individual recurs
in the position of a subject of the universal: this is a classic case of the "return
of the repressed." I would like to analyze the logic of this repression, and of the
return of the repressed, over the course of this series of lectures in order to ex-
plore the place at which the universal and the individual subject are rightfully at
home.
Having given this preview, I would like to return from the world of the
imaginarythe world of the merely promised and of that for which we hold out
prospects-to the real world. In the real world the split between structuralism and
hermeneutics plays the role of an indicator or seismograph: it indicates the degree
of incredulity connected today with claims to universality in philosophy, and it
demonstrates the extent to which the inter-European communication among in-
tellectuals of all nations meanwhile has been disrupted. The pessimistic judgment
that the European community is only a community of economic interests, without
in addition evoking unlimited intercultural communication, is difficult to deny
from this perspective.
Allow me to conclude this general introduction of myself and my project by
conjuring up the spirit of one of the great authors of early socialism in France,
a man who attempted untiringly to build bridges between French and German phi-
losophy: Pierre Leroux. His grand repost on Schelling's Berlin lectures from
1841 to 1842 culminates in the following exclamation, which completely ex-
presses my own wishes:
Once again, the time is approaching when there will no longer be one
or several German philosophies, one or several French philosophies,
but rather a single philosophy, which will be at the same time a re-
ligion.
3
My lectures have as their subject matter a phenomenon that initially can more
easily be defined by situating it historically and geographically, rather than by ex-
plaining its substance. Before I explain more closely the title, which, I assume,
sounds strange to most of you, I would like to try to specify the historical age and
the sphere of activity to which you will have to tune in your imaginations when-
ever I speak of "neostructuralism." I combine under this phrase theoretical ten-
dencies that-for the most part easily datable as belonging to the period just prior
to May 1968 - shaped intellectual trends in France to such an extent that one could
speak abroad (e.g., in West Germany) in abbreviated fashion of its authors as the
"new French." Actually, one should speak of the "new Parisians," for just as Paris
12 LECTURE 1
is the cultural metropolis of France due to the centralism of this country, so too
the doctrine of neostructuralism, (findeed such a doctrine exists, is concentrated
in the centers of the most important Paris universities. From there it has spread
to other universities in France, but these are symptoms of infection by contact
that simply allow one to locate more clearly the source of the virus in Paris.
Everyone who has some knowledge of institutions in France, and especially of
French universities, knows of course that my localization of neostructuralist
"doctrine" at a few Paris universities and elite colleges (the Collge de France,
the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Ecole Normale Suprieure, the former
University of Vincennes, to name just a few) is suspect of being a grave distor-
tion. It would have been truer to point to the fact that neostructuralism, as the year
ofits birth, 1968, indicates, is a movement that developed out of a certain opposi-
tion to the ruling doctrine above all in the teaching of philosophy and literature,
and which succeeded, despite cultural-political enmity, in effectively conquering
a few universities.
A glance at the entirety of French universities (and certainly even a glance at
the list of courses offered at Paris universities in numerous years since, lefs say,
1965) would probably strengthen the impression that in the instance of neostruc-
turalism it is a matter of a primarily marginal movement that was able to make
itself a home at the margins and at the doorstep of dominating instructional prac-
tice, and that was able to win over a certain vocal but not dramatic public there.
Now one must of course remark that the centers of cultural powerin this in-
stance centers of university power, and within these, those of the human
sciences-have always functioned inconspicuously, and that oppositional or even
parasitic movements have always found the limits of their development in the ab-
sorptive capacity of the ruling doctrinal flood to incorporate them through en-
closure. These are observations at which the historian can only arrive in retro-
spect, for phenomena tend to present themselves differently to contemporaries.
They perceive the intensity, the upheaval, and the agitation that deviating posi-
tions excite much more clearly than the quiet development of the educational ap-
paratus that is perhaps more representative of the spiritual situation of the age,
if only because it is of greater size. This, in fact, may also be true in the case of
neostructuralism. I am certain-and I have experienced this before at conferences
and lectures in Paris-that the resonant names associated with neostructuralist
theory either are considered unimportant or are simply unrecognized by
authoritative institutions (by means of their power to ignore, exclude, and render
harmless through integration). At a panel discussion held in April 1981 at the
Centre culturel allemand (Goethe-Institut) in Paris, at which I served as modera-
tor for, among others, Gadamer and Derrida, there were, aside from my name,
as I discovered afterward, two other names that many listeners in Paris it was
really quite a large numberdid not recognize: one was Gadamer, the other
Derrida.
LECTURE 1 H 13
I am relating this to you not (only) for your amusement but rather to permit
the proper caution, which is appropriate for contemporaries when assessing con-
temporary phenomena, to hold sway. Before maintaining that neostructuralism,
whatever it may be, is the trendsetting intellectual movement of the third and
fourth decades of the postwar era in France (that is, in Paris), one should not un-
derestimate the power of the nonneostructuralist, i.e., traditional, university dis-
courses. Yet it is still true that in the last fifteen years neostructuralism has
received the greatest attention-be it affirmative or negative-that a French in-
tellectual phenomenon can possibly have excited either in France or abroad. Here
as always the biblical statement that "the wind bloweth as it will and no one can
say whence it comes and whither it goes" remains true. If one interprets "wind"
as a metaphor for "intellect" (as, moreover, the passage itself does) and applies
this saying to the university situation, then it can be rendered in the following
way: intellectand all intellect is creative and innovativecan be weakened and
retarded by institutions and by that which Foucault has called the "dispositive of
power," but it will exert its right to exist, it will make its voice audible in the pub-
lic forum, it will draw attention to itself for a while to such an extent that the
official channels will either go along with or eradicate the disruptive voice. I don't
believe this description is exaggerated. Simply remind yourselves how small a
movement such as German idealism actually was, how little intrainstitutional
power supported it, and to how few places of influence it reached. At the time
it was heard in Germany, it was the exception and the violation of the norm within
the ruling stream of academic philosophy. Yet it appears to subsequent genera-
tions, due to a perspectival deception, as though the voice of idealism must have
been all-powerful in its day and overwhelmed all that existed next to it. Now
please do not be concerned: I do not take neostructuralism to be similarly over-
whelming. On the other hand, it is also true that its inconsiderableness in the face
of the academic mean does not present us with an image of its intellectual power,
something I would like to describe in more detail in this lecture series.
Now that we know when and where one can find neostructuralism, we can take
on two other questions: what it deals with and why we should concern ourselves
with it. I believe these two questions are intertwined, for as soon as we explain
a subject matter we will in every instance immediately also know i.e., be able
to decide-why we should occupy ourselves with this subject matter here and
now. An explanation of a subject matter that fails to aid in this decision would
treat its object as a "dead dog," as Hegel maintained of Spinoza's philosophy. But
neostructuralism seems to me to be in no way a "dead dog."
This is true first of all because neostructuralism is a powerful literary-
philosophical movement of the present day, and every contemporary can presume
that the circulation and echo this theory evokes in listeners and readers are for
the most part attributable to the fact that problems that are our very own have been
(and will yet be) spelled out by it. Now we doubtless never have a lack of prob-
14 U LECTURE 1
lems, and you will certainly want to interrupt immediately by asking what the na-
ture of the problems might be with which neostructuralism is especially con-
cerned.
I want to attempt to give an initial orienting answer to this question, as risky
as that may be. Neostructuralism, so it appears to me, is the present tip of an ap-
proximately 200-year-old tradition of thought that gathers under the remarkably
daring collective singular "the West" the infinite number of stories and the count-
less writings, doctrines, actions, and treatises that have arisen or glimpsed the
light of day in Europe over the last 2,500 years. That period of human evolution
that all of us without hesitation designate as Western has not always been viewed
as the unity for which we take it. Ifthis unity makes itself visibleand Foucault
places the birth of this mountaintop overview of the unity of the West in the year
1775 if the West proves itself a unit, it does so based only on the awareness of
a crisis. The first symptom of this crisis is the uncertainty as to whether we, who
perceive the West as a unified and closed whole, even belong to it. You probably
are familiar with Hegel's famous comment from the preface to The Philosophy
of Right, which I cite unabridged and in its context.
One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to
be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give
it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is al-
ready there cut and dried after its process of formation has been com-
pleted. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable
lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first ap-
pears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real
world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an in-
tellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a
shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be re-
juvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings
only with the falling of the dusk.
4
I shall summarize the kernel of Hegel's reflection: with regard to actuality,
thought finds itself in an indissoluble tardiness, for thought is the conceptual sub-
stance of the actual itself that is brought into the enclosure of the concept as a har-
vest is brought into the silo. In order to be conceived, this substance had first of
all to be; but if it is conceived, then it no longer is, then it has been, i.e., it has
stepped out of its pure Being-there into its essence. Essence (Wesen) is that which
has been. "Only when knowledge, coming out from the sphere of the immediate
Being, internalizes itself, does it through this mediation discover Essence," Hegel
claims elsewhere. "Language has in the verb Sein ("to be") preserved Wesen ("Es-
sence") in the past participle gewesen ("been"); for Essence is Being which has
passed away, but passed away non-temporally."
5
For Hegel himself this coming to essence (to has-been) of Western Being ap-
LECTURE 1 15
peared as a great, indeed as the decisive stage of a history that he also liked to
describe as the "history of progress in the consciousness of freedom," and whose
conclusion he celebrated in his philosophy of the spirit transparent unto itself. Just
as though the history of the West were, to use a metaphor applied with pleasure
and frequency in German idealism, a metaphor that for its part cites one of the
oldest Western texts, something analogous to the wanderings of Odysseus that,
while taking circuitous detours, finally return him to the homeland of Ithaca.
Therefore Hegel conceives the history of the European spirit (he is so Eurocentric
that one even has to say: he conceives the history of the human spirit) according
to the model of re-flection. "Reflection" means, literally translated, "turnaround,
return to the point of departure, inverted mirroring of the sort that the point of
departure appears as the point of destination." Precisely this is quite literally
the case in the wanderings of Odysseus. It was Hegel's hypothesis that the history
of European humanity can also be described as a search for the self and as a failure
to find the self. This was expressed by Schelling in 1800.
Yet the riddle could reveal itself, were we to recognize in it the odys-
sey of the spirit, which, marvelously deluded, seeks itself, and in seek-
ing flies from itself; for through the world of sense there glimmers, as
if through words the meaning, as if through dissolving mists the land of
fantasy, of which we are in search.
6
The history of the WestSchelling applied the same metaphor to the history of
nature would thus be the search for self, initial failure to find, and final finding
after all of spirit, which, when the owl of Minerva begins its flight, looking back
from the end of its journey comprehends all steps of the return to itself. At the
end of its journey spirit comprehends itself as that which it in itself already was
the entire time, without, however, having had reflective consciousness of it. Its
f
& unconscious being becomes"for it itselfa conscious possession at the end of
r
S$Cjts journey: it reflects itself in it as that which it is in spirit and in truth. "Tanta&.
h _rnoJis.ej:atse.ips.am cognoscere mentem": Hegel applies this epigraph to his Lec-
tures on the History of Philosophy, and in so doing he compares the self-founding
of full subjectivity with the toil of Aeneas in founding the Roman nation (Aeneid,
I, 33). Under this premise Hegel succeeds and I add: for the last time in judg-
ing the West in its completion as well as accommodating himself simultaneously
as the last inhabitant in the completed house of the West. When he shuts the door
the odyssey of the spirit is complete, the light of transparency is lighted, nothing
is hidden any longer, the process comprehends its historical identity from within.
Stronger, however, than the light Hegel's philosophy propagated was the
effect of the "beginning twilight," about which Hegel also spoke, on the souls of
his contemporaries and on posterity. Released from the traditionaland that im-
plies at the same time sheltering-frame of understanding of the West, the Euro-
pean intelligentsia faced a freedom not only cheered but also populated by cata-
W>
16 LECTURE 1
strophic visions. The twilight of the West and of the concept of rationality that
had come to power and to self-consciousness over 2,500 years was reflected as
a twilight of the gods, as a gradually increasing eclipse of meaning, and as a loss
of orientation of the type portrayed in poetic-sensual fashion by Nietzsche's apho-
rism about the "madman." Before looking at this I want to note that there was pro-
found reason to interpret the conclusion of Western spirit as the conclusion of the
rule of God, and therefore as the twilight of the gods. For even in Hegel the abso-
lute spirit is without much ado called God (to be sure, it is a detheologized god
because it no longer possesses anything dark and transcendental: it is totally iden-
tified with the enlightenment powers of the European spirit). It is therefore not
surprising that that "madman," about whom aphorism 125 in the third book of The
Joyful Wisdom tells, carries out the search for the absent unity of the West as a
search for the lost God whose continued ruleas spirithad lent the West its
unity and continuity.
Now this madman lights a lantern on a bright morning and runs across the mar-
ketplace crying unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" This cry causes in those
who do not believe in God anyway (and this is true of most of them) "a great deal
of amusement" that is discharged in ridiculing statements. The madman, how-
ever, jumps into the midst of the ridiculers and transfixes them with his glances.
"Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed
him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it?
How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this
earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move?
Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, side-
ways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do
we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space
breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on
continually darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the
morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are bury*
ing God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? for even Gods
putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!"
7
I break off the quotation here and will summarize the aspects most important for
our context. As you see, even the madman notices the fall of darkness, to such
an extent that he believes it necessary to light lanterns in the light of day so that
one might yet see anything at all. Here, in fact, the completion and that means
simultaneously the conclusionof Western spirituality is not then perceived as
a self-illumination, but rather as a twilight of the gods. You notice, moreover,
that it is not the vulgar atheism of those who simply do not believe in God that
horrifies the madman; it is not the sublation of that inauthentic relation to the ab-
solute, which is merely devoutly attentive, into absolute knowledge that disquiets
LECTURE 1 U 17
him: rather it is the death of metaphysics itself, for which the name of God is sub-
stituted as a personification.
With this we touch on a concept we will run across often in our lectures and
whose specific significance has its origin precisely in Hegel's and Nietzsche's sub-
lation/overcoming of metaphysics- In other words, Hegel, and even more so
Nietzsche, are constant discussion partners of neostructuralism, even where they
are not mentioned specifically (although they are mentioned almost constantly).
But let's save this for later examination. For the moment we are concerned with
an initial determination of what "metaphysics" could possibly mean, and we al-
ready possess a few criteria for an answer. For if with the death of God the entire
system of interpretation, foundation of meaning, and consolation of the Western
spirit is supposed to have broken down, then one can surmise what the lowest
common denominator has been of all those answers offered to mankind over the
last 2,500 years in response to their needs for meaning: namely, the certainty of
a transsensual world. And "metaphysics" is above all precisely this: the certainty
of the transsensual. Its death means for Nietzsche that Western philosophy as
Platonism and Christianity is at its end; that the interpretive and meaning-
foundational resources have been used up; that that which until now humanity
held to be the highest value of its Being-in-the-world has shown itself to be empty.
In this sense Nietzsche speaks of the devaluation of all values, which, mind you,
is not his, as it were, enlightened-critical contribution to the demythologization
of the West, but rather what he sees the West itself entering into with romanticism
and its pessimism.
After all, it was not the madman who killed God, the paradigmatic panacea
of the transsensual: "We have killed him!" And: "How have we done it"? By means
of enlightenment, by employing our powers for the domination of nature and for
self-emancipation from foreign dominance and tutelage. It is not by chance that
the madman mentions the Copernican cutting away of the sun from the earth and
the early modern discovery of the infinity of the universe in which there is no
above and below, i.e., no orientation points for one to get one's bearings in a
Dasein that has become rootless. Thus the great Western occurrence of the
eclipse of meaning began and was completed, the result of which was that by
seeking to transform certainties founded merely on faith in certainties grounded
in knowledge, it led unintentionally, indeed, against its own will, to the elimina-
tion of the category of "value" in itself. (Moreover, it also eliminated the category
of meaning, as Nietzsche himself claimed: "The closer one looks, the more our
assessment of values disappears meaninglessness approaches")* Enlighten-
ment about the theological prerequisites in our thought led to the destruction of
the transsensual world, and this in all its manifestations: as supreme value, as di-
vine creator, as absolute substance, as idea, as absolute spirit, as meaning or com-
munication context, or even only as the producing-conceiving subject of modern
technology and natural science. (We will encounter this list of terms in the texts
18 LECTURE 1
of the neostructuralists again and again.) One could formulate it differently: The
rationalist test to determine of what account God and the transsensual prerequi-
sites are in Western thought concluded that they were of no account; God and the
transcendental values amount to nothing. This is the precise hour at which "the
most uncanny of all guests," European nihilism, appears at the door (Nietzsche,
Werke, III, 881). In the appended fifth book of The Joyful Wisdom entitled "We
Fearless Ones," Nietzsche wrote in 1886: "The most important of more recent
events that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian God has become unwor-
thy of beliefalready begins to cast its first shadows over Europe" (Nietzsche,
Works, X, 275).
Now you will ask about the specifics of that enlightenment event Nietzsche
dealt with under the banner of nihilism. Has it not always been the role of what
the Greeks called episteme and modernity calls sci-ence (Wissen[schaft]) to sub-
late the previously believed into the currently known? Of course, but the differ-
ence is that previously something believed was left over, whereas now belief it-
self, the fixed point of orientation for our path through life, has been eroded. With
the definitive death of God it is not simply a matter of overcoming an epoch, the
Middle Ages and superstitious thought; rather it is a matter of overcoming
metaphysics in itself and as such. This means the overcoming of that formation
of interpretedness of Being in whose framework all the various answers in the
history of the West to the question about the meaning of Being were constituted.
The destruction of this frameworki.e., of this world ("world" understood here
as a global form of interpretedness of reality, as a meaning context in which we
function)-calls forth an orientationlessness of a wholly different type than that
which, for example, seized evanescent antiquity when confronted with the dawn
of the Christian Middle Ages, or that which seized the natural scientists of the
modern period when confronted with the dissolution of the Middle Ages. For in
these two epoch-making revolutions the meaning of Being, i.e., the global under-
standing of the world in which we are anchored, was not destroyed; rather one
candidate for the meaning of Being was simply replaced by another. Let's just say
that "God" was replaced by "reason." But even reason was a fundamentally theo-
logical conception, as is made concretely evident in Hegel's remark about a
"speculative Good Friday that was otherwise historical."
9
For Hegel the growing
feeling that "God Himself is dead" is already expressed in Pascal's comment: "Na-
ture is such that it marks everywhere a lost God, both in man and outside of
man."
10
For Hegel the death of God implies his death as a historic-religious event,
an event followed by his resurrection in speculative knowledge into which the
God of the West enters in truth and transfiguration, not as if climbing a guillotine.
Now, however, in times of nihilism, even supreme knowledge is eroded as a bas-
tion of trust in the world, and "we stray as through infinite nothingness."
With the death of metaphysics, of the certainty of a trans-sensual world, of a
supreme (legitimating) value, a situation is created that neostructuralism likes to
LECTURE 1 19
call "postmodern." I refer with this statement, as I will in later lectures as well,
to a popular text by Jean-Franois Lyotard that has the characteristic title The
Postmodern Condition,
11
and that wishes to take a position on the "spiritual situa-
tion of the age," that is, on the present day. With this we have some initial infor-
mation, even though it requires further interpretation, about what neostructural-
ism means, namely, that it is thought under the conditions of the postmodern era.
In the next lecture we will consider the sense in which this sentence can be said
to be valid.
Lecture 2
In our search for a first and yet preliminary conception of neostructuralist theory,
we came across the curious concept of postmodernism. We maintained that neo-
structuralism conceives itself as a manner of thought founded on the precondition
of the closure (clture) of modernity. The word "modern" does not designate only
the avant-garde and contemporary; rather it refers to the historical period of the
modern age in its totality. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is not the same as Les
Temps Modernes. If, for Jean-Franois Lyotard, a representative of what I am
loosely bringing together in the term "neostructuralism," moderne means "be-
longing to the modern age" (in the sense of belonging to the epoch since the
Copernican revolution), then postmoderne denotes a "condition" posterior to the
death of metaphysics. This, as you will recall, was the unintentional effect of the
Enlightenment; namely, that by critically questioning unjustified doctrines (e.g.,
dogmas), it simultaneously collapsed the foundation of its own legitimation.
From this point onward philosophy and bourgeois society as well has been ex-
posed to the problems arising from this loss of legitimation. There is an absence
of unquestionably certain values that could serve to support any claim to justifica-
tion, regardless of its nature and breadth. Previously such claims had been
provided either by religious belief, or by the itself quasi-religious faith in the
competence of theoretical and practical reason.
At this point, at the very latest, you probably want to interrupt me and interject
the following: postmodernism, which Nietzsche had located in the future, must
in the meanwhile somehow have made its appearance. The work of Martin
Heidegger, on the one hand, and the entrance of European politics into the epoch
id
L b U l UKfc / U Z I
of fascism, on the other, could be considered symptoms-quite different ones, to
be sureof this eclipse of meaning, as well as symptoms of what an early collabo-
rator and later opponent of Hitler, Hermann Rauschning, called "the revolution
of nihilism."
1
Be that as it may. Earlier I mentioned that neostructuralism, as that particular
theoretical movement we want to deal with and examine, forced its way into pub-
lic consciousness only in the years since 1968. What does this year, which has
practically become the year of a revolution, have to do with postmodernity? And
why does neostructuralism or poststructuralism carry the reminder of structural-
ism on its identification tag? Does this have something to do with the "postmodern
condition," and thus with "thought in the shadow of nihilism"?
I understand your impatience and I will attempt to pull together the various
strands in this web of questions in a coherent fashion. Allow me, therefore, to
present a few preliminary theses whose justification can only be brought in the
course of this series of lectures. These theses will serve to provide us with an ini-
tial rough sketch for the purpose of orientation. The first thesis-it has already
been stated is that neostructuralism, following in the footsteps of Hegel and
Nietzsche, is conceived as thought after the end of metaphysics. The second
thesis-and the question I imputed to you was aimed in this direction-is that this
postmetaphysical thought is simultaneously thought after structuralism. This is
brought out in differing ways by the terms "poststructuralism" or "neostructural-
ism," which are both insufficient designations for this phenomenon (a phenome-
non that has as yet not run its course, and that thus cannot yet be judged in its
entirety). "Poststructuralism" seems to me to be too neutral a designation; after
all, even the fall in the value of the dollar and the formation of a peace movement
occurred after structuralism, without having an inherent connection to it. "Neo-
structuralism" is also somewhat misleading, for this term implies that the
phenomenon we are dealing with is simply a renewal of the older, classical struc-
turalism as we have become acquainted with it through linguistics, literary criti-
cism, sociology, and philosophy as well. Furthermore, this designation is also un-
fortunate because it does not correspond exactly to such parallel terms as
neo-Thomism or neo-Marxism; for these took up again, although in altered and
revisionistic form, theoretical positions whose development either had been
historically interrupted, oras in the case of neo-Marxismhad been cut off by
a dogmatic fixing of the doctrine. This is not the case for neostructuralism: it fol-
lowed immediately upon classical structuralism, represented by such figures as
Ferdinand de Saussure (filtered through Bally and Sechehaye), Emile Benveniste,
Julien A. Greimas, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and
Roland Barthes, and it retained to this extent an inherent connection with struc-
turalism. In other words, neostructuralism is not only, as the term "poststructural-
ism" suggests, a school of thought that came to light after structuralism; it is also
22 LECTURE 2
critically linked to structuralism and cannot be understood if one ignores this
origin.
My third preliminary thesis, finally, is that neostructuralism radicalizes and
overthrows the ethnological-linguistic structuralism that precedes it by means of
a philosophical perspective. (Structuralism, after all, saw itself more as a method-
ology of the human sciences than as a philosophical movement.) This perspective
is attained through a reconsideration of Nietzsche's overcoming of metaphysics.
That is why the names of Heidegger and Freud must be appended to the previ-
ously mentioned list of philosophical precursors of neostructuralism. (No doubt
we could also add the names of Emmanuel Lvinas and Georges Bataille, who,
however, for their part stand profoundly under the influence of the former pair.)
Thus our list is composed solely of German philosophers and theoreticians, who,
however, have experienced a considerably different interpretation in German-
speaking countries, and who confront those German scholars who curiously peer
across the border into France in an oddly unfamiliar (yet fascinating) reading.
This circuitous detour doubtless has something to do with the discontinuous evo-
lution of recent European history, and especially with the difficulty the Germans
had in picking up their own cultural tradition after the catastrophe of the Third
Reich. While the postwar era in West Germany is characterized by a gradual
movement away from Heidegger and Nietzsche (and toward the theoretical stand-
points of Kantian or analytical philosophy, the latter mediated by the immigration
of German scholars to Anglo-Saxon countries), the "new French thinkers" appear
to want to tell untroubled the uninterrupted story of the German critique of
metaphysics from Romanticism all the way to Heidegger. Even Saussure, more-
over, is not an exception to this pattern. Recent investigations, which the "Edition
critique" by Rudolf Engler made possible,
2
have been able to trace the supposed
revolution that Saussure caused in linguistics back to sources in the German ideal-
ist philosophy of language (especially to the philosophy of Humboldt, Schleier-
macher, and Steinthal, the latter of whom Saussure probably heard lecture in Ber-
lin). This is all noted in passing in order to explain the specific West German
interest in neostructuralism. I will return to this issue later.
As already mentioned, the names of Heidegger and Freud must be appended
to our honor role of neostructuralism. The former belongs here because he, fol-
lowing Hegel and Nietzsche, seeks to overcome metaphysics in the name of
BeingBeing that does not wholly abandon its essence to any conceivable theo-
retical reflection. The latter must be included for a structurally similar reason;
namely, because he allows for an unconscious that cannot be completely illumi-
nated, no matter how hard one strains one's power of conceptualization. Il-
luminate, conceive, explain: these are fundamental desires of that which
neostructuralism perceives as the specific European episteme, i.e., form of
knowledge, which for neostructuralism itself is no longer valid. The postmodern
form of knowledge can be neither Platonic idealism nor Christian faith nor even
LECTURE 2 D 23
Hegelian self-consciousness. Nor can it be-and with this I arrive at the justifica-
tion of my reference to the year 1968that episteme manifest in classical struc-
turalism.
Cognizant of the danger of oversimplification, I must nonetheless briefly
characterize the episteme of structuralism in a preliminary manner. The concept
"structure," in the specific sense that concerns us here, developed out of a particu-
lar reading of Saussure's Cours de linguistique gnrale, although the expression
itself cannot be found there. Saussure spoke, rather, of a language system.
3
For
Saussure, this expression refers to the ordering principle according to which the
lexicon of a language is not only articulated, but articulated, moreover, in such
a way that it can be recognized and mastered as the lexicon of one and the same
national language. This occurs through acts of differentiation and connection. In
the first place, all elements of expression that make a sign hearable or readable
must be clearly distinguishable from one another; for the richness, i.e., the
differentiation, of my linguistic world is only proportionate to my ability to distin-
guish among signs. This, according to Saussure, is not immediately possible
based on the meaning of signs, but rather only by means of their expression. For
meanings in themselves are amorphous, intangible, purely mental, and lacking
a distinguishable profile. Therefore, if I wish to distinguish among meanings, I
can accomplish this only by distinguishing among sound images or written
images-i.e., signifiers. Yet differentiation is merely one aspect of the linguistic
system: once linguistic signs have been reduced to their smallest constituents,
they must once again be joined to form morphemes, words, phrases, sentences,
and finally textsindeed, ultimately to form a linguistic image of the world. In
conclusion, we can now risk a vague dfinition of "structure": a structure is a sys-
tem of pairs meaning/expression, i.e., signified/signifiersuch that one and
only one signified is assigned to every signifier. This, moreover, occurs accord-
ing to a firm and lasting rule that allows both the differentiation of signs and their
recombination. To take an illustration that structuralism was fond of, call to mind
the image of a crystal lattice. Here the individual molecules are both distinct from
one another, as well as related (connected) according to strict rules of formation.
The formulation of this principle of formation would be the structure (the blue-
print) of this crystal.
4
Here we have touched on a fundamental principle of the structuralism debate.
In what follows it will be our objective patiently to work out in detail the mecha-
nism of this principle. My intent here has not been to give a whirlwind introduc-
tion to Saussure's linguistics; rather it was a matter of exposing a particular impli-
cation of this system-model of language. Let me bring it briefly to light. It is the
implication that the individual signs are exact applications of an invariable law
to which they are related just as individual instances relate to the concept under
which they are subsumed. In a crystal lattice the molecules are not only distinct
from one another, they are, at constant low temperature, ^/Lced to their places',
24 D LECTURE 2
i.e., they cannot swarm outward, nor is there any blurring that would make their
location and thus their application uncontrollable.
Now it is precisely the concept of uncontrollability that ^^structuralism inter-
jects into the debate at this point. "Control," thus Derrida, Deleuze, or Lyotard
objects, is a move in the language game of rationality, i.e., of metaphysics.
Metaphysics not only supplies Dasein orientation for human beings, it guarantees
and practices this orientation in the form of domination. In the metaphysical
cosmos, "order" rules insofar as the laws of the human mind govern the shape
of matternature, for example. Nature and materiality come into view only as
the object or as the realm of application where reason holds sway.
Structuralism itself, as we have just defined it, stands outside metaphysics in-
sofar as it no longer shares a specific basic assumption with it, namely, that the
sensual world is a mirror image, a form of expression, or, for that matter, an area
of application of the transsensual world. The expression "transsensual world"
probably seems overcharged in this context. Yet indeed, the world of "facts and
figures" is transsensual, or to put it more simply, nonsensual in the sense of not
corresponding to anything in the visible world. The application, for example, of
scientific laws to nature is always external to nature itself. It is an exercise of
power, of spiritual domination imprinting its formula on nature. Behind the seem-
ingly value-free theoria (to be taken in the Greek sense of the word) is a "will
to power," a will to overpower. Heidegger convincingly demonstrated this hidden
aspect that the traditional idealist metaphysics of the "divine Plato" shares with
the drive to dominate nature characteristic of modern technology and the applied
sciences. According to Heidegger, the history of metaphysics is the history of a
gradually growing self-empowerment of subjectivity that reaches its zenith in
modern-day technology's drive to dominate the world. To keep this voluntaristic
aspect of theory/technology/science away from the awareness of those who prac-
tice it, one devised and perpetuated the strategy of passing reality off as a product,
or as a material reflex, of the world of thought. Reality became the sensual re-
presentation (i.e., re-presencing) of something in itself nonsensual: the world of
ideas, axioms, formulas, terms, and laws that we may thus confidently treat, fol-
lowing Hegel, as a "supersensible world."
5
As I just said, structuralism as we have encountered it thus far breaks with this
working hypothesis still tinged by metaphysics. For structuralism the sensual is
not a reflection or expression of something nonsensual in the sensual itself. Let's
remain within the more easily comprehensible realm of sign theory: the sound
aspect of the sign is conceived of as the represencing of a sign's nonsensual or
spiritual aspect, its meaning. Even Aristotle had viewed the word as a simulacrum
of psychic and mental processes. This view is inverted by Saussure's thesis that
the meaning of a sign is the effect of articulation of its material of expression. By
no means is there a prior world of nonsensual psychic or cognitive states or
processes that then might be represented by a world of symbols. On the contrary,
LECTURE 2 D 25
the nonsensual world of thoughts is itself constituted as a result of differentiation
and combination in the realm of the sensual-phonic.
Up to this point, as I mentioned earlier, structuralism is not metaphysical.
However, it is metaphysical on the basis of another premise. Insofar as structural-
ism searches for general ordering principles and universal regularities, the
knowledge of which renders the social world capable of technological and scien-
tific mastery, its knowledge interest is dominated by the guiding desire of West-
ern theory, namely, to make nature theoretically accessible. Even without a sub-
ject that forms and changes the rules, structuralism remains a traditionally
metaphysical endeavor. The talk about an "unconscious spirit," which, according
to Lvi-Strauss, is weaving anthropological and grammatical structures, makes
this particularly evident. Paul Ricoeur called Lvi-Strauss's structuralism a "Kan-
tism without a transcendental subject."
The French thinkers whom I tentatively bring together under the collective
heading of "neostructuralism" try to steer clear of these last encroachments of
metaphysical thought. Structuralism for Jean-Franois Lyotard, for example, is
still "modern"; those who want to make allowances for the contemporary provo-
cations of a postmodern condition must break with it (which undoubtedly cannot
mean breaking with all its premises). The decisive attack the "postmodern" enter-
prise launches against "modernity" is first of all directed against the (metaphysi-
cal) concept of domination and of system. If I am correct, this is the lowest com-
mon denominator that connects the writings of otherwise so different
theoreticians as Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kristeva, Baudrillard (in the
cases of Foucault, Althusser, and Barthes I am as yet undecided). Now you have
an idea about why I earlier stressed the revolutionary year of 1968. Around that
time the bond that joined classical structuralism (which had remained loyal to the
concept of a self-enclosed system) to neostructuralism (which challenged this
concept) broke within the consciousness of Parisian intellectuals.
6
There is, so
to speak, a touch of revolutionary energy in the anarchism of the neostruc-
turalists. In the duel between the forces of order (preservation of the system) and
entropy (dissolution of the system), they side with the latter. However, they es-
tablish their position not by rejecting Saussure's conception of a differential artic-
ulation of the sign, but rather by challenging the idea that this articulation takes
place in a theoretically comprehensive and enclosed system-a "taxonomy," as
linguists call it. The "structure" of the neostructuralists no longer knows any
specifiable confinement: it is open, subject to infinite transformations, and is not
motivated by the ambition formally to master individual "events" (vnements) in
what since then has come to be called "the text in general."
7
Let me summarize: neostructuralism takes up certain working hypotheses of
classical structuralism, i.e., the officially sanctioned version of Saussure's Cours
de linguistique gnrale.
8
Among these hypotheses is first of all a brusque rejec-
tion of the notion that words are somehow images for prior existing ideas or
26 D LECTURE 2
"na^niiorca *n<; Vvxfjc;" (psychic impressions), similar to the way in which syn-
tactical connections reflect logical syntheses that combine thoughts with predi-
cates to form judgments. We will later refer to this hypothesis as the representa-
tional model of language.
However, in contrast to the working hypotheses of structuralism, neostruc-
turalism rejects the idea of scientific-technological domination of its object. In the
idea of a linguistic or a social system, with linguists studying language and so-
cioanthropologists studying the structure of a population, neostructuralists un-
mask a final encroachment of metaphysical thought, which is thought evolving
around concepts of power, of control, mastering, overpowering. The idea of em-
powerment is bound to that of presence, for only the visibly present, that which
shows itself in what it is and how it is (i.e., in its essence), can be dominated con-
ceptually and systematically. Heidegger, however, has taken precisely this to be
a basic aspect of the Western interpretation of Being: that it thinks "Being" as
"presence" (ousia, parousia). To this Western interpretation of Being, neostruc-
turalism juxtaposes the concept of a nonpresence that is never entirely sublatable
into presence (a "nonpresent remainder," L/, 187),
9
a "structural unconscious"
(LI, 213), and a principle of "undecidability" (LI, 216) of the meaning of signs:
"the nonpresent remainder of a differential mark, cut off from its alleged 'produc-
tion' of origin."
10
I shall interrupt my introduction at this point. As you realized, I have not been
able to go beyond simple assertions. That is the fate of all introductions that are
only harbingers of arguments to be presented in what follows. Therefore, the fol-
lowing lectures will try to recapitulate in argumentative fashion what has been
asserted here only in the form of theses. I will not proceed by introducing every
neostructuralist writer extensively and in "correct" order, for by following such
a procedure we would too easily lose track of the unity of our general question
about the nature of neostructuralism. I will attempt rather to enter into a
philosophizing dialogue with neostructuralism, and I will do this in such a way
that I segregate the subject matter of neostructuralism from the manner in which
it is actually treated in this or that critical text. Let me say in advance that it seems
to me that argumentation is the weak side of neostructuralism. And this is not only
because argumentative procedure is too easily aligned by the representatives of
this movement with traditional Western methodological practices, and therefore
considered a pudendum something to be avoided at all cost. It is also the case
because, in my opinion, the theoretical insight that forms the origin of neostruc-
turalism can be more forcefully developed than has actually occurred in the criti-
cal texts. In other words, one can sometimes uphold the "germinal idea" of neo-
structuralist theory, while rejecting the blind degeneration it has undergone in
texts like those of the later Deleuze or Baudrillard (and thinkers of a comparably
rash temperament). I will exploit this procedure as a constructive hermeneutics
that unfolds a thought as far as, in my opinion, it allows itself to be unfolded. Only
LECTURE 2 U 27
after this is done can one begin with critical scrutiny; a thought will be rejected
only if it cannot be upheld even in what I consider to be its most complete formu-
lation.
I imagine as a rough organization for my lectures a tripartite division or-
ganized around those ideas on the basis of which neostructuralism launches its
critique of what it calls the classical episteme. First of all there is the attack on
thinking in terms of the concepts of history; second, there is the attack on the cate-
gory of the subject (or self-consciousness); third, there is the confrontation with
a hermeneutics based on the preeminence ofmeaning. In all these fields of conten-
tion (which, of course, are connected with the names of different authors), the
common denominator is the rejection of metaphysics, which, since it will be
universally present, I need not treat separately.
Before I deal with the first field of contention, that concerned with history, I
want to uncover more distinctly and patiently neostructuralism's point of depar-
ture in classical structuralism (mainly in Saussure's Cours and in the writings of
Claude Lvi-Strauss). Only then will I turn to Lyotard's, Derrida's, and Fou-
cault's reflections dedicated to that historical occasion out of which sprang the de-
struction of the very possibility of thinking in terms of structure.
We want to accomplish two things in the second part of this lecture. First, we
want to look more closely at the movement with which neostructuralism departs
from classical structuralism; in connection to this we want to ascertain in subse-
quent lectures its motivations for this departure. The second question will already
put us on a track that will lead us to the center of the development of neostruc-
turalist theory. This question then reads: what historical configuration shook the
paradigm of structural thinking; what point marks the epistemological break that
separates modernity from postmodernity?
I wish to remind you of our provisional attempt to make above all else the fun-
damental concept of structure more precise. To be sure, colloquially we designate
in appropriate contexts all sorts of forms and ordered constructs as "structures,"
without, indeed, being able to hope that with this we already possess a key for
illuminating structuralist procedure. For this reason we have to proceed more
carefully; and I suggest that we begin by once again calling to mind the formula
we tentatively agreed upon previously, and that we then later illustrate it through
a concrete example.
Not without being influenced by Russian formalism and by the structuralism
of the so-called Prague circle, linguists first rendered with the word "structure"
what in Saussure was called "the language system." I will ignore for the moment
the difficult situation of the manuscripts left after Saussure's death and will not
(yet) address the question whether the "structuralist Saussure" was not an ingen-
ious invention of his first editors, Bally and Sechehaye. But even if one affirms
this thesis, it still cannot be denied that the text of Saussure's Cours de linguistique
28 LECTURE 2
gnrale edited by Bally and Sechehaye (from 1915) served as the sole basis of
structuralism, just as the Vulgate served as the sole basis of biblical interpretation
for the Catholic church.
1
* Naturally, / hope that there will be a reformation of
Saussure scholarship, just as there was one of the church.
Bally and Sechehaye apparently took the thesis about the systematic composi-
tion of language to be Saussure's fundamental insight. To be sure, Saussure had
distinguished speech {laparole), as the manner in which language is present daily
in concrete form, from language's system/form, which he called la langue, La
langue is not an ensemble of speech acts by means of which we communicate with
one another, but rather the abstract and as such never manifest order that oper-
ates, as it were, underneath our speech acts and that stamps its law upon these
acts. Saussure also calls this law the "code" of a language {Cours, 31). It relates
to actual speech acts as a pure possibility {virtualit) to its realization {actualisa-
tion). Only as speech is language real; however, that does not mean that it derives
its ground of Being from this reality. One can clarify this through a simple con-
sideration : if we had to identify the meaning of a word on the basis of its acoustical
form, we would never identify it. For no word, no matter how small it might be,
is reproduced in absolutely the same way by all speakers, nor even by the same
speaker at different times. Thus if we identify it as this particular word at all, then
we have to posit a hypothesis; we must draw an ampliative inference that reveals
the given chain of voice production {chane phonatoire) as one instance of a
general speech type, which as such does not belong to the order of parole. This
hypothesis, by virtue of which we take a phonetic chain as the stimulus to associ-
ate with it a certain meaning, is what first establishes the Dasein of a sign. What
previously in the realm of concrete speech was an unrepeatable and unique
acoustical figure has now been elevated to the status of a sign. You see from this
relatively simple reflection that the fact of language mastery demands a theory
that strictly differentiates the concrete vocal-graphic event {vnement) from its
never realizable and, to this extent, essentially ideal nature as a sign. For the sign
by no means connects, as one might at first believe, the vocal-sensual with the
nonsensual spiritual aspect of a word; rather it connects, as Saussure expresses
it, an acoustical image {une image acoustique) with a concept {concept). An
acoustical image does not simply mean a sound. Rather, this expression means
that different, never identical phonations (phonatisations) are recognized as sub-
strata of one and the same sign only then, when one re-cognizes in them articula-
tions of one and the same acoustical image. However, in order to be able to iden-
tify essentially different sounds as realizations of a single acoustical image, one
must already have apprehended the acoustical aspect of language from the view-
point of its possible meaning {concept, signifi). And this in turn means that one
must have the entire system of langue present (one must master it). For only in
a structure that is neither reliant upon nor subordinate to individual reproduction
can signs have a meaning that is both eternally stable and reidentifiable over
LECTURE 2 U 29
numerous occurrences (the criterion of recursivity). To this extent the system of
langue is not as is a realization in concrete speech itself material; it further is
distinguished from speech in that it does not move in time, but rather is strictly
timeless (synchronique); and finally, it is distinguished from speech in that its sta-
tus of Being is pure possibility and not actuality. On this basis we can understand
that famous statement in the Cours that language (la langue) is no substance, but
rather a form (CGL, 113, 122). This statement draws an inference out of two
complementary observations we made in the last lecture. I will repeat them here
because they are fundamental for all that follows. The first observation claims:
Psychologically our thoughtapart from its expression in words is
only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have al-
ways agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be
unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas.
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no
pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of lan-
guage. (CGL, 111-12)
Now this is also correspondingly the case for the acoustical aspect of language.
The sounds as well are not, as it were, by nature carriers of possible units of
meaning, as the naturalist illusion assumes.
Against the floating realm of thought, would sounds by themselves yield
predelimited entities? No more so than ideas. Phonic substance is nei-
ther more fixed nor more rigid than thought; it is not a mold into which
thought must of necessity fit but a plastic substance divided in turn into
distinct parts to furnish the signifiers needed by thought. The linguistic
fact can therefore be pictured in its totality i.e. languageas a series
of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of
jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B). The fol-
lowing diagram gives a rough idea of it:
(CGL, 112)
30 D LECTURE 2
If, therefore, there are neither prior existing ideas that might be portrayed by
sounds, nor even fixed and firm sounds from which meanings could be wrested,
then one must imagine the process of sign synthesis as a stepping-into-the-middle
on the part of langue, with the result that now at one stroke both a signifier and
a signified are born.
The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to cre-
ate a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link
between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring
about the reciprocal delimitations of units. Thought, chaotic by nature,
has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are
thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental
entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" im-
plies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape
between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet
of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water
will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble
the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance. (CGL, 112).
The illustration used by Saussure is self-explanatory. It dispels the notion that
words are names of ideas (or even of things); but it also dispels the notion that
ideas might have to accommodate themselves to prior existing acoustical forms.
Both streams, that of thought as well as that of sound, are synthesized through
the same act; and this act is nothing other than what since the time of Humboldt
has been called articulation in this specific sense. Articulation means, translated
literally, membering (from articulus, the member of a body): "Each linguistic
term is a member, an articulus in which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound
becomes the sign of an idea" (CGL, 113).
Both the sound and the thought are distinguished through articulation. How-
ever, distinction presupposes differentiation. A thought (and thus a sign as a
"unity of thought and sound") is identical with itself only insofar as it is different
from all other thoughts of a system. Here we once again come across the idea of
determination through contrast (or through negation), which is fundamental to
structuralism. To recognize something as something means to differentiate it
from all other recognizable things. Negation here has the sense of "other
than . . ." ("Omnis determinatio est negatio": Spinoza, Hegel). The same is true
of the sign: I interpret it as this (and not as that) by differentiating its acoustical
image from the acoustical image of all other signs, i.e., by apprehending it from
the viewpoint of its possible meaning. The phonic materiality of the sign thus does
indeed play a decisive role: only by means of it does identification of meaning
occur. However, this should not be taken to mean that one could already read out
of the sound as such its meaning (indeed, the sound is amorphous); rather a sound
becomes a signifier only when I interpret it as the acoustical image of a meaning,
LECTURE 2 D 31
and only mastery of the virtual system of langue can motivate me to this interpre-
tation. It is in this sense, therefore, that Saussure can say: "Their combination
produces a form, not a substance" (CGL, 113). Language, viewed as a system
of pure differences, has in itself nothing that is substantial: it is not a treasury or
storeroom (trsor) of positive meanings or of positive signs', rather it is a web of
values (valeurs), i.e., of negative references to other values. Saussure expresses
it this way in a striking and famous passage.
Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in
language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference
generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up;
but in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither
ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only
conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.
The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance
than the other signs that surround it. Proof of this is that the value of
a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being
affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified, (CGL,
120)
Coming to an end of my summary of Saussure's ideas, I would like to anticipate
what is to come by saying that classical structuralism developed out of a strong
interpretation of this passage (and of the entire fourth chapter of the Cours in
which it is found). Let's repeat once again the fundamental idea that led to the
formula that language, viewed as a system of pure differences, is a form and not
something substantial. The basic idea is that the linguistic sign, since there is no
"natural relationship" between sound (son) and idea (ide), cannot be conceived
on the basis of its "positive" (i.e., material, substantial, innately meaningful)
characteristics: there is nothing in the acoustical qualities of the signifiant that re-
minds of the value or the content of that which it signifies. Structuralism rendered
a strong interpretation of this state of affairs. An extreme expression of this classi-
cal structuralism is found in Hjelmslev, who defines the structure of a language
as an "autonomous entity of inner dependencies."
12
This means that structure is
nothing but a mere mesh of differences and of relationships among values-
lacking any positive (i.e., existing in itself) actuality, be it one of meaning or one
of expression: it is, therefore, pure form.
Units and grammatical facts would not be confused if linguistic signs
were made up of something besides differences. But language being
what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it regardless of our approach;
everywhere and always there is the same complex equilibrium of terms
that mutually condition each other. Putting it another way, language is
a form and not a substance. (CGL, 122)
32 LECTURE 2
As "proof of this," the observation is made in the Cours that the value of a linguis-
tic term can be altered without altering the sound or the meaning of this term,
and this occurs simply by means of a new differentiation, i.e., through a new ar-
ticulation of the "unity of sound and thought." Conversely, of course, the struc-
ture also remains unchanged when a series of marks (marques) is removed from
the game and replaced by equivalent terms. Classical structuralism, but not Saus-
sure himself, referred to this possibility as that of transformation. Since this is
a fundamental concept for the work of Lvi-Strauss, I will insert a few words
about the mechanism of structural transformation at this point.
When saying that structuralism has to do with systems of transformations, one
seeks to express the following: the elements encountered in a structure are func-
tions and do not count because of their physical characteristics or because of any
characteristics that are determined to be independent of their membership in a
structural formation. An element becomes a function precisely because it steps
out of its material actuality and transforms itself into a systematic value. The same
function can be taken over by elements that are materially quite different; con-
versely, the same material element can fulfill wholly different functions according
to the immediate task the system entrusts to it. That sounds complicated, but it
is actually quite simple: the knife with which I cut bread is the same physical ob-
ject as that with whose gleaming blade I reflect rays of light. It simply takes over
different functions, the first in the regulated system of housework, the second in
the regulated system of an optical experiment. Conversely, the same function can
be taken over by different materials; remaining within the current example, the
blade of my bread knife can replace a mirror if I have no other instrument at hand,
etc.
Of course, transformations of the second type play the greatest role in the
framework of structuralism. We saw that structureas pure form has to do nei-
ther with expressions nor with meanings, but rather with "values." Now the
values are equivalent to the functions in our example and can be taken over by
any substances whatever: "The opposition between the simplicity of the structure
and the multiplicity of elements is expressed in the fact that several elements com-
pete to occupy the same positions in the structure" (SA, 62). This follows from
the "arbitrariness" of the sign synthesis (that is, out of the nonnaturalness of the
bond between thought and sound). If one then asserts that the values/functions
can be represented by random substances (just as the score of the Eroica can be
performed by random orchestras and random instruments of the same type, nat-
urally), this, of course, does not mean that the values themselves are random. On
the contrary, call to mind the statement of L. Hjelmslev: "Language is an essen-
tially autonomous entity of inner dependencies, and thus a structure."
1
This
means that the expandability and the richness of possible transformations are a
priori limited and are controlled by the demand of the given system to remain for-
mally identical in all its different substantializations (or realizations). Jean Piaget
LECTURE 2 D 33
designated this characteristic of structures with a central concept of his theory as
self-regulation (autorglage). The concept means that structures do indeed
change, yet always only within the continuum of their self-preservation as struc-
tures. This presupposes the concept of structural closure: the transformations in-
herent in a structure may never transgress its limitations; rather it can only pro-
duce elements that pertain to its structure and conform to its rules. "These
properties of conservation along with stability of boundaries despite the construc-
tion of indefinitely many new elements presuppose that structures are self-
regulating."
13
This, by the way, is also a basic assumption of so-called systems
theory in the social sciences, represented by Parsons and Luhmann, which to this
extent is directly traceable to classical structuralism.
We will close here for the moment and investigate the transposition of linguis-
tic structuralism onto the work of anthropology and mythology (in and through
the work of Claude Lvi-Strauss) in the next lecture.
Lecture 3
Having glanced at structuralism's magic formulalanguage is not a substance,
but a form from various sides, and having developed some of its consequences,
we would now like to illustrate, as promised earlier, how it works in the nonlin-
guistic sphere taking the example of Claude Lvi-Strauss. It is general knowledge
that Lvi-Strauss, taking Saussure and Troubetzkoy's phonology as his point of
departure, tried to discover numerical properties and transformational groups in
kinship systems. What is more important for us and for neostructuralism is
that he traced these structures even within the transition from one classification
to another, from one myth to another, and from one collective practice to another,
in order ultimately to formulate the structure of mankind's supposed "unconscious
mind."
Let's first look at the areas where Lvi-Strauss overlaps with Saussure and
where his version of structuralism goes beyond the linguistic approach. First the
areas they have in common. Saussure had already declared linguistics to be a
mere (though most important) branch of what he called semiology. Semiology is
"a science that studies the life of signs within society; it would be a part of social
psychology and consequently of general psychology. . . . Semiology would
show us what constitutes signs, what laws govern them" (CGL, 16). The rule that
the meaning of a social sign is the effect of differential relations to other signs is
valid if, indeed, it is correcta fortiori not only for linguistic systems in the nar-
row sense. This is the fundamental assumption on which Claude Lvi-Strauss's
structural anthropology is based. All systems of meaning, even nonlinguistic
ones, whose laws govern human interaction make use of the universal features
LMJl UKf c, J U J 3
that Saussure only coincidentally first discovered within the system of langue. To
be sure, linguistics, as a science, is enviably far advanced.
1
But there is a close
methodological bond between the two disciplines that obliges them to cooperate
(see SA, 29).
Which procedures of linguistic structuralism could then be adapted by a struc-
tural anthropology without any problems? Lvi-Strauss mentions four that he bor-
rows from Nikolai Troubetzkoy.
2
N. Troubetzkoy, the illustrious founder of structural linguistics, himself
furnished the answer to this question. In one programmatic statement,
he reduced the structural method to four basic operations. First, struc-
tural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena
to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat
terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the
relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system
"Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are al-
ways part of a system; it shows concrete phonemic systems and eluci-
dates their structure"; finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering
general laws, either by induction "or . . . by logical deduction, which
would give them an absolute character." (SA, 31)
When, Lvi-Strauss says, an event of such eminent importance takes place in one
branch of the human sciences, it is not only permissible but even requisite that
related disciplines "examine its consequences and its possible application to
phenomena of another order" (SA, 31). What are these consequences?
Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes,
they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. "Kinship
systems," like "phonemic systems," are built by the mind on the level of
unconscious thought. Finally, the recurrence of kinship patterns, mar-
riage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of rela-
tives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamen-
tally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship
as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action
of laws which are general but implicit. The problem can therefore be
formulated as follows: Although they belong to another order of reality,
kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena. Can
the anthropologist, using a method analogous inform (if not in content)
to the method used in structural linguistics, achieve the same kind of
progress in his own science as that which has taken place in linguistics?
(SA, 32)
Well it seems to me that the claim is obvious. Let's give further consideration for
a moment to what Lvi-Strauss calls the formal analogy between phonology and
anthropology. It consists in the "unconscious activity of the mind." This is one
36 LECTURE 3
of the favorite concepts of this author, and it is nothing but a metaphor for what
Saussure called "form" in his Cours. Languages share with social structures (and
with myths, as we will see in a minute) the characteristic that one cannot conceive
their meaning in terms of their content-on the basis of the material properties
of their elements but rather only by conceiving these elements as values, i.e.,
as functions of a system of pure relations. I will cite a characteristic formulation
of this analogy.
In anthropology as in linguistics, therefore, it is not comparison that
supports generalization, but the other way around. If, as we believe to
be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing
forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for
all minds ancient and modern, primitive and civilized (as the study of
the symbolic function, expressed in language, so strikingly indicates)
it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underly-
ing each institution and each custom, in order to obtain a principle of
interpretation valid for other institutions and other customs, provided of
course that the analysis is carried far enough. (SA, 21-22)
Lefs repeat the central thesis of this passage: the unconscious activity of the mind
consists in "imposing forms upon content." If we add "upon previously unarticu-
lated content," then we find ourselves referred immediately back to the beginning
of Chapter 4 of Saussure's Cours where the principle of the articulation of signs
is explained. Mind is in itself just as amorphous as sound; therefore, something
has to intervene between the two, namely, the schematism of articulation through
which a sensually perceptible sound can be related to a nonsensual meaning in
the first place.
By supplementing the term "articulation" with the term "schematism," I have
recalled in passing a fundamental theorem of idealist language philosophy that
Saussure himself, as well as Lvi-Strauss, as you will soon see, made use of. It
was Kant who posed the question of how our pure concepts of understanding
(which have nothing sensual about them) can be related to the empirical data our
experience transmits to us (and which, in turn, have no intellectual quality). His
answer was that it is possible by means of a specific operation of our imagination
that is capable of relating a pure (or empirical) concept to the objects of ex-
perience on the basis of a scheme. The scheme is, in Kant's own words, the
"representation of a universal procedure of imagination in providing an image for
a concept."
3
On the one hand, the scheme is universal like the concept; on the
other hand, it is empirical and concrete like the image that I make of a single ob-
ject. This way it can serve as an intermediary if it is a matter of relating the pure
concepts of our mind to particular materials from our world of experience. The
same thing is accomplished and this further conclusion was made by Schelling
and Schleiermacher by the articulation of signs: the sign as well is a synthesis
LECTURE 3 G 37
of a concept and a perception (Anschauung); it shares the universality of thought
with the particularity of its, in each instance, singular reference to an object. A
concept alone would be meaningless (i.e., without reference to an object); and,
vice versa, perception (Anschauung) without conceptual interpretation would be
contentless. The scheme serves as intermediary and generates that object, both
sensual and intellectual, which we know as the sign.
Precisely this process of schematization or articulation Lvi-Strauss at times
calls the unconscious mind, which semiologically (i.e., by means of a structure)
relates social reality and the objective; at other times he calls it the "conceptual
scheme" which mediates between the social praxis of the collective and the prac-
tices of the individuals. I shall cite a longer passage from The Savage Mind which
deals with this.
If, as I have said, the conceptual scheme governs and defines practices,
it is because these, which the ethnologist studies as discrete realities
placed in time and space and distinctive in their particular modes of life
and forms of civilization, are not to be confused with praxis which
and here at least I agree with Sartre (p. 181)constitutes the fundamen-
tal totality for the sciences of man. Marxism, if not Marx himself, has
too commonly reasoned as though practices followed directly from
praxis. Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures, I
believe that there is always a mediator between praxis and practices,
namely the conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and
form, neither with any independent existence, are realized as structures,
that is as entities which are both empirical and intelligible. It is to this
theory of superstructures, scarcely touched on by Marx, that I hope to
make a contribution.
4
I believe that after having spent so much time with Saussure's idea of a mediation
between sensual sound and intelligible meaning by means of & form of differential
relation, you will have no difficulty transferring this thought onto the structural
anthropology of Lvi-Strauss. The quoted passage essentially asserts nothing
more than this: that the undifferentiated activities and actions of a society or a
population are not, as it were, inherently connected with the cultural and intellec-
tual processes through which this society articulates its self-understanding, nor
are these connected by means of a process of mutual portrayal, but rather by
means of structure. Human thoughts are related to the actions of the base in the
same way as signifier and signified are related in the sign: not by virtue of a lien
naturel, but rather by means of differential relations between carriers of expres-
sion whose interplay founds the unity of thought (of culture) and perception (An-
schauung) (of the base, of praxis, of the sound) in the first place. Accordingly,
there are not two structures, one of social praxis and one of individual (artisan,
artistic, and theoretical) practice; rather, it is one and the same praxis that estab-
lishes mind as the mind of this base, and base as the base of this mind. The struc-
38 D LECTURE 3
ture of society is insofar nothing substantial, but rather a pure form, i.e., a context
of assignments or references (in Heidegger's sense) not between objects but be-
tween values. Heidegger, by the way, takes up a structuralist thought when he
says:
The context of assignments or references, which, as significance, is
constitutive for worldhood, can be taken formally in the sense of a sys-
tem of Relations.
5
With this Lvi-Strauss believes he has uncovered the inner relations between a
structural theory of society and the procedures of structural linguistics. The fruit-
fulness of this transferral is generally known, and Lvi-Strauss's works do not
need to be praised by me, an amateur in anthropology. We, however, who are
for the most part students of philosophy and/or literature, are mostly interested
in the application to which Lvi-Strauss put Saussurean linguistics in the field of
mythology, for myths are narratives that, in contrast to kinship relations or social
structures, are located in the immediate realm of the linguistic. There is yet a sec-
ond reason why we must take a brief look at this new process of the transposition
of method: namely, because all of structuralism and neostructuralism, from Fou-
cault through Derrida, has taken up Lvi-Strauss's doctrine at precisely this point.
For those of you who would like to know what I mean, I will mention in passing
that I am thinking of the establishment of the term "discourse," with whose coin-
ing something new is introduced into the human sciences. But let's proceed ac-
cording to the logical order of the argument.
In his famous essay "The Structure of Myths" (in Structural Anthropology)
Lvi-Strauss introduced a procedure that he applied with great success to the anal-
ysis of myth in his principal work, the Mythologiques.
6
We will limit ourselves
to a discussion of its methodological maxims on which the analysis follows, and
we will compare them to what we know from Saussure.
Lvi-Strauss begins with a fundamental objection addressed at all previous
theories of myth. According to these theories, myth is the expression of a hidden
reality; for example, of the archetypes of the human mind, of the conditions of
a certain society, of a cosmological interpretation of the world, or of the drives
and adventures of the human character, etc. Let's first consider the assertion that
myth reflects social contents.
If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say
an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grand-
mothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure
and the social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it
would be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide
an outlet for repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever dialec-
tic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found.
(SA, 203)
LECTURE 3 39
The essential point of this interpretation of myth is that myth is read as the reflec-
tion of a content, and precisely not as a structure in the sense that is familiar to
us. Lvi-Strauss replies to this that myth as myth is completely indifferent to the
narrated contents, and that it is thus impossible to define the authentic mythic
quality of the myth on the basis of an investigation of motif and content.
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is
likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic
can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be
found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand,
this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between
myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If
the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the
fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? (SA, 203-4)
The question must sound rhetorical to us. We will not hesitate to answer: the
similarity between myths of different populations cannot be an element of the
similarity of the narrated contents, but rather must be a formal feature. Myth, like
language, is not a substance, but a form.
Lvi-Strauss, in fact, compares the failure of the motif-oriented approach in
the study of myth with the failure of the old theory of the representational charac-
ter of language.
For the contradiction which we face is very similar to that which in
earlier times brought considerable worry to the first philosophers con-
cerned with linguistic problems; linguistics could only begin to evolve
as a science after this contradiction had been overcome. Ancient philos-
ophers reasoned about language the way we do about mythology. On
the one hand, they did notice that in a given language certain sequences
of sounds were associated with definite meanings, and they earnestly
aimed at discovering a reason for the linkage between those sounds and
that meaning. Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very be-
ginning by the fact that the same sounds were equally present in other
languages although the meaning they conveyed was entirely different.
The contradiction was surmounted only by the discovery that it is the
combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the
significant data. (SA, 204)
The tertium comparationis of both conceptions is that they do not take into ac-
count "the Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character of linguistic signs" (SA,
204). This principle, which denies a natural relation between meaning and sound,
forces one to come up with a different explanation of the actual determination and
distinction of signs, namely, that of the schematism of articulation, which takes
signifier and signified not for "simple" and "positive" quantities but rather for
effects of the differential relations between "values," in short, as effects of linguis-
40 LECTURE 3
tic form or structure. It is the "activity of the unconscious mind" that generates
the similarities between myths of peoples, myths that otherwise, as far as their
content is concerned, can be extremely different.
At this point in our discussion, where Saussure's working hypothesis that
figures of meaning have to be dealt with not as substances but as forms seems
to have proved itself for a second time in the work of Lvi-Strauss, a decisive
problem arises. The thesis is no longer subsumed under Saussure's structuralism;
rather it demands its own theoretical legitimation. There is, of course, a decisive
difference between the inner form of a language and that of a myth. Myths, al-
though they are linguistic formations (and thus fall under the concept o langue),
are, on the other hand, events of parole: "they arise from discourse" (SA, 209;
translation modified).
We are now coming across a concept that, as most of you already know, is
one of the central marks in the language game of neostructuralism. We have to
take a closer look at it. To this end we will gladly allow ourselves to be initially
guided by a style as clear and illustrative as that of Lvi-Strauss. The chapter enti-
tled "The Structural Study of Myth" formulates the difference between myth (qua
discourse) and langue as follows:
In order to preserve its specificity we must be able to show that it is
both the same thing as language, and also something different from it.
Here, too, the past experience of linguists may help us. For language
itself can be analyzed into things which are at the same time similar and
yet different. This is precisely what is expressed in Saussure's distinc-
tion between langue and parole, one being the structural side of lan-
guage, the other the statistical aspect of it, langue belonging to a re-
versible time, parole being non-reversible. If those two levels already
exist in language, then a third one can conceivably be isolated. (SA,
205)
Myth, as a self-enclosed sequence of phrases, i.e., as narrative, is indeed a lin-
guistic event, but it is not one of the sort that its individual sequences could be
removed without harm from their relative temporal positions. The linearity of the
sequence of signs and, what is more, of phrases provides each significant element
with a time index; i.e., it is not reversible. The elements of a structure, on the
other hand, the values and their relations, are easily reversible. The matrix that
generates them as events is strictly atemporal (atemporelle). Saussure himself
had, as you know, described this difference with the terms "synchrony" and "di-
achrony." Lvi-Strauss now reminds us that the concept of structure, which so
far has been used completely without differentiation, is in itself subdivided in a
manifold way: it is a formation within which we can distinguish among different
levels of constitution.
LECTURE 3 D 41
I should explain this briefly. It was Emile Benveniste who, in his principal
work, Problmes de linguistique gnrale, introduced the concept of levels of
constitution, justifying it in the following way.
7
The point of departure for his
idea is that Saussure's insight that linguistic meaning is constituted by phonic
differentiation is in need of further discrimination. After all, there are different
levels on which this principle, which itself is entirely abstract, can function.
There is, for example, the phonetic level, on which one can differentiate the in-
dividual sounds of a language; there is further the phonological level, on which
the "distinctive features" of an individual language can be sorted out and its possi-
bilities of combination and opposition can be determined; then there is the mor-
phemic level, on which the smallest significant parts of the word are identified;
the syntactical level, on which the words are distinguished and combined to syn-
tagms (and phrases); finally, the contextual level, which is concerned with the nu-
ances of meaning of entire expressions within the context of other expressions,
etc. Now we can differentiate between those relations that obtain between ele-
ments on a particular level (for example, phonemes) and those that obtain be-
tween elements of one level and elements of another (for example, words and
phrases). Benveniste calls the former "distributional" and the latter "integrative."
A structure of a language would thus be the totality of relations, not only between
elements of the individually segregated levels, but also between all levels of con-
stitution themselves.
To be sure, Benveniste, as a linguist, ends his analysis on the level of the sen-
tence: in the sentence the totality of linguistic rules is exhausted. In contrast to
this, myths, as discourses, are structures whose smallest constituent units are not
phonemes, morphemes, or syntagms, but rather phrases. But who, Lvi-Strauss
continues, would constrain us from climbing up to an even higher level of consti-
tution: a "third level beyond language and parole," namely, the level of "dis-
course" ("Myth is a mode of discourse"; SA, 210, translation modified, emphasis
added by author). With this we have arrived at a first, still unrefined, definition
of a key term for neostructuralism: discourse is a linguistic formation, the
smallest constitutive units of which are phrases, or which, as Lvi-Strauss puts
it, is constructed out of large (grosses), not out of small, units.
Now that we know this, we will, of course, recall the other feature of mythic
discourse, namely, its one-dimensionality, which seems to distinguish it from the
system of langue. After a closer look, however, this distinction does not carry
as much weight as its formulation might imply; myths, like parole, organize their
elements according to a certain order in time; however, it is a temporal order of
a peculiar type. Mythical time is always already past, or, to be more precise, it
is a timelessly past time. As senseless as it would be to deny the successivity of
speech events in myth, it would be just as senseless to assert that the succession
of the narrative parts had evolved in an actual historical time. Exactly this, how-
ever, is a condition for the succession of phrases in parole. A mythic event is,
42 LECTURE 3
although past, reproducible at any time: it is past, and, at the same time, as long
as it is rooted in the collective beliefs of a population, it is timelessly present, just
as the message of the birth of the son of God repeats itself every Christmas. This,
in turn, myth has in common with langue.
It is that double structure, altogether historical and ahistorical, which
explains how myth, while pertaining to the realm of parole and calling
for an explanation as such, as well as to that of langue in which it is
expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which, though
it remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other
two. (SA, 205-6)
We know that this third level of language is the level of discourse, and we want
to keep this in mind.
Let's highlight once again as precisely as possible the decisive points. In com-
mon with the elements of linguistic systems, the elements of myth do not have
a value (or meaning) in themselves, but are meaningful only by virtue of the rela-
tions they have with each other; i.e., both are structures. On the other hand,
myths, qua discourses, are structures composed of large or transphrasal units,
and this sets them apart from languages (langues). If one nevertheless wishes to
analyze them in a structuralist fashion, one needs to draw a conclusion by anal-
ogy, and this Lvi-Strauss prepares in two steps.
(1) Myth, like the rest of language, is made up of constituent units. (2)
These constituent units presuppose the constituent units present in lan-
guage when analyzed on other levelsnamely, phonemes, morphemes,
and sememes but they, nevertheless, differ from the latter in the same
way as the latter differ among themselves; they belong to a higher and
more complex order. For this reason, we shall call them gross constitu-
ent units, (SA, 206-7)
In this passage the idea of what subsequently will be called the linguistics of dis-
course is born. It was Roland Barthes who formulated most clearly its working
hypotheses (although he only repeats, as you see, what Lvi-Strauss had already
said).
8
I will give you a small excerpt:
As is well known, linguistics stops with the sentence: it is the ultimate
unit that linguistics believes itself to have the right to deal with. . . .
And therefore it is evident that discourse itself (as made up of sen-
tences) has an organization through which it appears as the message of
another langue, which is on a higher level than that of the linguists;
discourse has its units, its rules, its "grammar": even though it is com-
posed solely of sentences, discourse should naturally be the object of a
second linguistics that goes beyond the sentence. . . . if one must es-
tablish a working hypothesis for an analysis whose task is immense and
whose materials are infinite, it is most rational to postulate a homologi-
LECTURE 3 D 43
cal relationship between sentence and discourse, to the extent that one
sole formal organization probably governs all semiotic systems, what-
ever their substances or dimensions: discourse would be a large "sen-
tence" (whose units would not necessarily be made up of sentences),
just as every sentence, within certain limits, is a small "discourse."
9
Lvi-Strauss, for his part, calls the smallest units of a myth "mythemes." They
share with the "constitutive units" of discourse the property that they are phrases,
yet they are distinct from specifically literary texts in that they do not exhibit any
style.
Myth is the [mode of discourse] where the formula traduttore, tradit-
tore reaches its lowest truth value. . . . Its substance does not lie in
its style, [its mode of narration], or its syntax, but in the story which it
tells. (SA, 206)
This property makes them even more similar to the constitutive units of a merely
formal system of rules, as that of langue; for langue, too, absolutely ignores the
individual manner of how the individual speakers realize their linguistic com-
petence.
In order to remain within the bounds of the analogy (Barthes says: homology)
between mythemes and lower-level linguistic units, myth analysis must observe
the same principles of abstraction as phonology. For the phonologists, the theore-
ticians of speech sounds and their distinctiveness from other sounds, the phoneme
is not a concrete sound or tone that can be measured and grasped in its acoustic
reality. The phoneme is much rather a certain function at whose dfinition one
arrives by means of the "commutative method" (i.e., according to the law of sub-
stitution or nonsubstitution by another phoneme), and whose value consists in the
fact that it distinguishes itself from (or in opposition to) all other values. Saussure
was sufficiently clear on this point.
In addition, it is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to be-
long to language. . . . This is even more true of the linguistic sig-
nifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal constituted not by its mate-
rial substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from
all others. (CGL, 118-19)
10
In this sense the phoneme is for Saussure a pure form, no substance d'expression,
i.e., a play of contrasting relations without material essence. In precise analogy
to this, a mytheme is not one of the concrete (stylistically, phonetically, or
narrative-technically qualified) phrases of a myth, but rather an "oppositional
value" that can correspond to individual phrases that are realized in very different
ways in the mythic narrative.
According to this selection process, "bundles of such relations" (5/4, 207) are
generated, that is, columns of phrases that belong together, not because of their
44 n LECTURE 3
respective individual content, but because they serve the same function. Like the
elements of the periodic table, they are vertically aligned in a column according
to their valence, and, at the same time, they contrast on all levels with the horizon-
tally facing elements by virtue of shared qualities (valences). In other words, it
is not the content of the phrases that determines their membership in a column
but rather the fact that they stand in functional contrast to certain other mythemes.
It is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined
so as to produce a meaning. Relations pertaining to the same bundle
may appear diachronically at remote intervals, but when we have suc-
ceeded in grouping them together we have reorganized our myth ac-
cording to a time referent of a new nature, corresponding to the prereq-
uisite of the initial hypothesis, namely a two-dimensional time referent
which is simultaneously diachronic and synchronic, and which accord-
ingly integrates the characteristics of langue on the one hand, and those
of parole on the other. (SA, 207-8)
Let me briefly summarize how Lvi-Strauss illustrates his method using the ex-
ample of the story of Oedipus. It is characteristic for his approach, for Lvi-
Strauss is not a classical philologist; his field of study is the myths of the Indians
displaced to the tropics. Well, he arranges four vertical columns in which he dis-
tributes according to certain criteria of content which, to be sure, are entirely
independent of their actual narrative succession all the phrases that make up the
myth. In the first column are placed all the phrases (mythemes) that deal with an
overrated blood relationship (for example, Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta;
Antigone places blood relation above civil solidarity and buries her brother, Poly-
nices, who is a political aggressor; etc.). In the second column are placed all
events that, in contrast to the first, deal with an underrated or ridiculed blood rela-
tion (Oedipus kills his father; Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices). To the third
column are assigned the monsters that appear in the myth, including the manner
in which they are combatted (sphinxes and dragons). In the fourth column,
finally, are gathered all proper names occurring in the myth that address a
difficulty in walking upright: being lame, awkward, or having a swollen foot, etc.
(Oidi-pus, literally translated, means "swollen foot.)"
With this the hermeneutical ground, from which further interpretation can pro-
ceed, is prepared. As soon as the table is filled in we can engage in a first compara-
tive analysis. Comparison of the four columns brings to light a correlation: be-
tween the first and the second there exist correlations insofar as they sometimes
overrate, sometimes underrate blood relationships; the third and fourth columns
are correlated by a sometimes asserted, sometimes denied autochthonous origin
of the human being.
11
Lvi-Strauss evaluates these correlations in this way:
LECTURE 3 H 45
It follows that column four is to column three as column one is to
column two. . . . By a correlation of this type, the overrating of
blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to
escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. (SA, 212)
In other words, blood relation, the maternal principle, is victorious over the vio-
lent attempt to overcome it (thus father and brother are killed); just as the princi-
ple of the earth, the swollen foot, proves itself superior by means of the victory
over the sphinx/mother.
The myth thus appears as a kind of logical instrument that groups certain con-
tradictions in order to surmount them in the end.
The inability to connect two kinds of relationships is overcome (or
rather replaced) by the assertion that contradictory relationships are
identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way.
<&4, 212)
This result may seem obscurelike much of that which has recently come to us
from across the French border. But that is immaterial. In any case, you will no
doubt agree that the chosen method of analysis clearly deserves to be called
rational and that it invites imitation, for example, within the framework of other
interpretations of myths or fairy tales. That has actually happened frequently and,
in some cases, with considerable success; and we can certainly say that some pro-
gress was made with regard to the transparency of interpretive procedures that
otherwise were subjugated to so-called intuition or to a subjective interpretation
in the bad sense of the word.
We can, of course, ask ourselves from a hermeneutical standpoint whether
Lvi-Strauss's method of discourse analysis, which he outlined in "La structure
des mythes" and applied with great intelligence, indeed with genius, in his prin-
cipal work, the Mythologiques, is actually tenable as a scientific alternative to the
classical procedure of interpretation, or whether the construction of tables that
appear to serve a purely analytic-formalistic end is not itself rather the result of
what is basically semantic interpretation of texts. This is not the place, however,
to pursue this.
In conclusion I would like to direct your attention to a completely different is-
sue, namely, the extent to which the procedure introduced by Claude Lvi-
Strauss deserves the name "classical structuralism," for it is as the illustration of
this that I briefly presented it to you. You may recall that for a first and rough
characterization of this phenomenon I drew on a comparison with the crystal lat-
tice: it was meant to shed light on the similarity between the conception the miner-
alogist has of his object and that of the taxonomist of language, or, for that matter,
of discourse (or myth). And, in fact, Lvi-Strauss admits at the conclusion of his
essay that he too was inspired by the model of the crystal lattice.
46 LECTURE 3
If this is the case, we should assume that it closely corresponds, in the
realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in the realm of physical matter.
This analogy may help us to better understand the relationship of myth
to both langue on the one hand and parole on the other. Myth is an in-
termediary entity between a statistical aggregate of molecules and the
molecular structure itself. (SA, 226-27)
To be sure, molecular structure adheres even more strictly to regularity than the
structure of a crystal seems to. A crystal displays irregularities, distortions, dis-
placements, etc., which accounts for the fact that no matter how similar, two
crystals are never completely identical. This also applies to myths, which, in-
deed, not only reproduce an identical scheme, but which at the same time are also
charged with new meanings in ever new social and historical circumstances. Let's
not forget that myth is also a diachronic narrative that extends linearly and is not
only realized in the structural correlation of groups of relations. Yet it is precisely
this that does not play a decisive role for Lvi-Strauss: in his search for the invari-
ant structures of the human mind he emphasizes that the contents, which serve
in each case as a means for filling out the scheme, are arbitrary and are of account
only as transformations of identical functional values. This is also valid for the
supposedly decisive leap the human mind accomplished when crossing the thresh-
old from mythic to scientific thought.
If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely different
view-namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous
as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality
of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is
applied. This is well in agreement with the situation known to prevail in
the field of technology: What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is
not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally
well made, but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we
may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as
in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the im-
provement lies, not in an alleged progress of man's mind, but in the
discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and un-
changing powers. (SA, 227)
We don't want to judge here how realistic this claim is and how favorably or un-
favorably we are disposed toward its implicit ethics; we only want to highlight
that characteristic feature of Lvi-Strauss's work that finds its emblem in the met-
aphor of the crystal and in the distinction between "hot" and "cold" societies. The
structures of discourses are, with the exception of their semantics, invariant.
Moreover, the history of mankind is essentially "cold" beneath the surface ap-
pearance that gives us the image of constantly "hot" revolutions and changes; i.e.,
it is a series of transformations of identical functions. The crystal and the steady
LECTURE 3 n 47
low temperature that impedes the melting and swarming out of molecules that are
bonded in a lattice are the emblems of taxonomical structuralism. Taxonomy
paints the picture of a history of mankind that is heading toward the absolute
freezing point: its aim-the wish-fulfillment dream of the structuralist-is death
by hypothermia.
We will see in the next lecture the objections neostructuralism brings against
this model and how, without reinstating the former dignity of the old European
subject, it brings back into play the experiences of revolution, subversion, and
"hot" histories.
Lecture 4
To give you an idea of what, in an abbreviated form, I am calling "classical struc-
turalism" I have referred mainly to two works and two authors: Ferdinand de
Saussure and Claude Lvi-Strauss. The former was the first to develop the idea
of a structural semiology; the latter was the first to extend it beyond the bound-
aries of linguistics to include the spectrum of the human sciences in general. To
be sure, numerous other persons (and works) could be mentioned: for example,
Algirdas Julien Greimas, who first developed the idea of a "structural semantics"
and applied structural procedures to literary texts; or Grard Genette, who on this
basis brought literary history, genre theory, and rhetoric into the spectrum of
structuralism; or Roland Barthes, who, following Greimas, first made structural-
ism popular for textual criticism. Nevertheless, it is true that it was above all
Saussure and Lvi-Strauss who succeeded in emitting the most decisive impulses
and whose names are invoked most frequently in that critical movement that
wants to disengage itself from structuralism and that we have provisionally in-
troduced as "neostructuralism." This is true for the work of Lacan as well as for
that of Foucault and Derrida.
I indicated earlier that the transition from classical structuralism to neostruc-
turalism was accomplished on the basis of an opening up of the concept of struc-
ture. One can observe this turn already in Lvi-Strauss's later works, especially
in the "Overture" and in the "Finale" of his Mythologiques. Here Lvi-Strauss
contradicts the "Cartesian principle" according to which scientific study must un-
cover in all myths manifestations of one and only one principle.
1
This expecta-
Lf cCl UKf c 4 U 4V
tion, says Lvi-Strauss, will be disappointed. Myth analysis is much rather com-
parable to the work of Penelope.
There is no real end to mythological analysis, no hidden unity to be
grasped once the breaking-down process has been completed. Themes
can be split up ad Infinitum. Just when you think you have disentangled
and separated them, you realize that they are knitting together again in
response to the operation of unexpected affinities. Consequently the
unity of the myth is never more than tendential and projective and can-
not reflect a state or a particular moment of the myth. It is a phenome-
non of the imagination, resulting from the attempt at interpretation; and
its function is to endow the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its
disintegration into a confusion of opposites. The science of myths might
therefore be termed "anaclastic," if we take this old term in the broader
etymological sense which includes the study of both reflected rays and
broken rays. But unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go
back to its own source, the reflections we are dealing with here concern
rays whose only source is hypothetical. Divergence of sequences and
themes is a fundamental characteristic of mythological thought, which
manifests itself as an irradiation; by measuring the directions and angles
of the rays, we are led to postulate their common origin, as an ideal
point on which those deflected by the structure of the myth would have
converged had they not started, precisely, from some other point and
remained parallel throughout their entire course. (SM 7, 5-6)
In this passage, it seems, we come across a considerable reinterpretation of the
mode of Being of (mythic) structures. Lvi-Strauss at this point seems to be deny-
ing that there is something like an organizing center in which the threads of
mythic texture converge or at which the texture is joined. Myths, he rather as-
serts, never allow the unity of their organization to be seen; this unity has only
a tendential or projective character. "If it has any unity, that unity will appear only
behind or beyond the text and, in the best hypothesis" and now follows what
could almost be a reception-hermeneutical perspective"in the best hypothesis,
will become a reality in the mind of the reader" (SM 7, 6).
Before we draw rash conclusions from this argument (in the direction of a neo-
structuralist turn) we have to take a closer look at Lvi-Strauss's formulation. It
all depends on whether he denies myth or the structure of myth an organizing
unity, a quasi-transcendental principle that governs its organization. The preced-
ing passage clearly only mentions the missing unity of myth and, to be more pre-
cise, the "divergence of sequences and themes" of myth. If this is the case, then
this text expresses basically what we could already read at the end of "The Struc-
tural Study of Myths." There he said:
And since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of
overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it hap-
50 LECTURE 4
pens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinit number of slates
will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. (SA, 226)
This slight difference that separates one slate, on which the mythologist identified
the structure of the myth, from another slate actually does not affect the "logical
model" itself, which remains identical in all myths, different as they might be;
rather it affects the changing contents in which this model is realized. And only
in this sense is the assertion valid that the unity of myth is only tendential or
projective: a narrative that is never wholly complete and that is only completed
transitorily in our respective readings.
If this, then, is also applicable to the passage from the "Overture" of the
Mythologiques, to talk about a decentrality of myth would be only a metaphor for
a structural order that is transformational. You remember that we understood a
transformation to be the spectrum of content distributions for the same function.
At most a transformational structure could be without unity in the sense that the
chain of contents or meanings, which in any single instance can occupy the same
value, cannot be determined a priori, and in this sense it is infinite and without
unity. The structure of values itself, however, would still be thoroughly unified
and closed, although it would be constantly subject to the insertion of new con-
tents and new inscriptions. This seems to me to be what Lvi-Strauss actually be-
lieves. "What I have tried to give is a syntax of South American mythology" (SM
7, 7-8). "Syntax" here means the totality of rules governing the reciprocal con-
nections between signs. Lvi-Strauss even wants us to ignore the semantic side
of the signs that are to be connected. Precisely this is the essence of the structural
demarche that sets pure form above substance. A structural syntax, therefore,
does not need to pay attention to every possible single event, just as a person who
is writing a structural grammar of French does not necessarily have to have col-
lected all sentences ever heard or uttered in French. On the contrary, once the
fundamentals of a structural syntax are worked out, one can even make a judg-
ment based on them as to whether a single mytheme is actually a case of the under-
lying (deep) structure that guarantees the reciprocal translatability of all conceiv-
able myths one into the other. I will give you another short passage from the
"Overture" that illustrates this.
Mythological patterns have to an extreme degree the character of abso-
lute objects, which would neither lose their old elements nor acquire
new ones if they were not affected by external influences. The result is
that when the pattern undergoes some kind of transformation, all its
aspects are affected at once. And so if one aspect of a particular myth
seems unintelligible, it can be legitimately dealt with, in the preliminary
stage and on the hypothetical level, as a transformation of the homolo-
gous aspect of another myth, which has been linked with the same
LECTURE 4 U 51
group for the sake of the argument, and which lends itself more readily
to interpretation. This I have done on more than one occasion. (SM 7,
13).
A classical case of transformation: if, while one is in the process of structuring
a myth, one comes across an element that is difficult or impossible to integrate
in it and, at the same time, one is far enough advanced in the formulation of a
deep syntax, one may confidently replace this disturbing element with one that
has the same valence (in the structural sense of the word), but which fits the con-
tent better. Lvi-Strauss, whose brilliant style constantly has to cover up the inex-
actness of his terminology, proposes the following definitional convention:
I propose to give the name armature to a combination of properties that
remain invariant in two or several myths; code to the pattern of func-
tions ascribed by each myth to these properties; and message to the
subject matter of an individual myth. (SM 7, 199)
This means that the identity of the code, of the system of functions, allows com-
pletely different frameworks, i.e., inscriptions of content. Schelling's Philosophy
of Mythology supplies us with brilliant illustrations for this procedure: depending
on the alternating points of view, Demeter is Persephone's mother, and, at the
same time, born later than her; or she is Poseidon's wife, and his parent as well;
or she is Zeus's wife, although he, however, is only born after her, etc.
2
Thus
the same content can, with regard to the function it fulfills at a given moment,
occupy completely different values of the mythic syntax, which, for its part, re-
mains always identical as code.
Yet in the "Finale," the final piece of the Mythologiques entitled The Naked
Man (from 1971), there are formulations that go a step further than those in the
"Overture." Let's recall our question: is there a unity of structure, or does one
have to conceive the concept of structure as open? In a first attempt to broach this
issue we went as far as to say that the openness of the mythic framework does
not endanger, or does not have to endanger, the unity of structure. To this extent
we were within the realm of transformational structuralism. Lvi-Strauss, how-
ever, had, at the same time-and even as early as the "Overture"excluded Car-
tesianism and with it also the idea that at the control panel of the organization of
structure there sits a subject, regardless of whether we interpret it as an in-
dividual, as the subject of the human race, or as "national spirit." Lvi-Strauss
accepts it when Paul Ricoeur calls his structuralism a "Kantism without a tran-
scendental subject."
3
That means that there is an order in myths, but this order
is not the work of an ordering and self-conscious subjectivity. Neither is there
an adequate reflection of myth by the subjects who hand it down, just as no reflec-
tive mastery of the phonological apparatus of a language is required for speakers
of that language to use it correctly. We already noted earlier that Lvi-Strauss
52 U LECTURE 4
considered this feature, the unconsciousness of the rules of the code, to be Saus-
sure's and Troubetzkoy's central discovery. He then arrives at a conclusion that
we will have to examine in the light of our question about the unity of structure.
It is the same with myths as with language: the individual who con-
scientiously applied phonological and grammatical laws in his
speech . . . would nevertheless lose the thread of his ideas almost im-
mediately. In the same way the practice and the use of mythological
thought demand that its properties remain hidden. . . . I therefore
claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in
men's minds without their being aware of the fact. (SM 7, 11-12)
Here we come across a formulation that seems strange on first sight and for which
neostructuralism will supply us with innumerable variations: myth, language,
text, they all speak themselves; it is not the subject that, as their author, speaks
them. This formulation in part appeals to similar statements by symbolist poets
(Mallarm, for example), in part to Heideggers's "language speaks." Before we
ask ourselves whether those who make such formulations understand themselves,
let's shed some light on the function of this formulation. Apparently, in this dras-
tic metaphor, the possibility of considering the speaking subject or the subject that
hands down myth as the originator of linguistic or mythic structure is supposed
to be eliminated. And this indeed contradicts a central aspect of modern
metaphysics. For the time being, let's leave this observation as it is without ex-
amining its plausibility. At this point we are mainly interested in the fact that the
statement "man is structured by structure itself contradicts a certain idea about
the origin of the unity of this structure: if there is a unity of structure, then it is
notas in the world of Immanuel Kant and German idealism a precipitate of the
ordering activity of a transcendental subject. Nevertheless, it does have a unity,
and Lvi-Strauss acknowledges this when he accepts Ricoeur's comparison of
structuralism to a "Kantism without a transcendental subject."
Our question must be as follows: can one think of the unity of a structure with-
out at the same time thinking of a unifying center? Some of Lvi-Strauss's formu-
lations (for example, that of the projective unity of myth that finds its completion
in our interpretation or reading) seem to imply that he by all means is thinking
of such a principle, itself not structural, which, to be sure, is not a subject.
Jacques Derrida anticipated this difficulty, or, to be more cautious, this conse-
quence. In his essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences," which is written in a particularly clear and readable style, he brings
together two observations explicitly directed at Lvi-Strauss.
4
The first claims
that the ordering of events according to structures (even before the term "struc-
ture" was coined) is as old as the history of scientific knowledge itself, i.e., as
old as the West. In his second observation, Derrida adds that the coherence of
structure is grounded in the fact that all its elements appear to be directed toward
LECTURE 4 53
a center of meaning: directed at the very object of all scientific endeavors, namely
at truth in all those forms the West has successively attributed to itas God, as
Idea, finally as subjectivity. The question remains, staying for the moment with
Lvi-Strauss, whether the idea of a grounding center of meaning itself and as such
is overcome by excluding subjectivity as the unifying center from this chain of
paradigms, or whether it reappears in disguised form. "Even today," Derrida be-
lieves, "the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable it-
self (WD, 297). Let's see first what the later Lvi-Strauss (I mean the author of
the "Finale" of the Mythologiques) has to say concerning this question. First he
takes up, this time in more radical fashion, what he already addressed in his
"Overture," i.e., the question of the anonymity of mythic thought that is the work
of nobody. The notion of "anonymous thought," he continues,
also indicated a deeper concern to reduce the subject to what, in an un-
dertaking of this kind, he ought to try to beif indeed he can ever, in
any circumstances, be anything else: the insubstantial place or space
where anonymous thought can develop, stand back from itself, find and
fulfil its true tendencies and achieve organization, while coming to
terms with the constraints inherent in its very nature.
5
The removal of the subject from a place where it plays no role, i.e., from the
anonymous code Lvi-Strauss also calls the activity of the unconscious mind, in
no way means that one has to give up one's scientific knowledge interests. On the
contrary :
The subject, while remaining deliberately in the background so as to al-
low free play to this anonymous deployment of discourse, does not re-
nounce consciousness of it, or rather does not prevent it achieving con-
sciousness of itself through him. Some people pretend to believe that
the criticism of consciousness should lead, logically, to the renunciation
of conscious thought. But I have never had any other intention than to
further knowledge, i.e., to achieve consciousness. However, for too
long now philosophy has succeeded in locking the social sciences inside
a closed circle by not allowing them to envisage any other object of
study for the consciousness than consciousness itself. This accounts, on
the one hand, for the powerlessness of the social sciences in practice,
and on the other for their self-deluding nature, the characteristic of con-
sciousness being that it deceives itself [about itself, as is well-known
since Rousseau, Marx, Durkheim, Saussure, and Freud]. (SM 4, 629)
This passage displays a characteristic movement: consciousness, stepping outside
of structure, is promised compensation for its dethronement. It is as though one
whispered in its ear, give yourself up and you will be regenerated. In other words,
the structural human sciences promise the subject, which under the eye of self-
reflection (i.e., under the conditions of modern metaphysics) could not achieve
54 D LECTURE 4
any useful knowledge about itself, that it can gain such knowledge if it dissolves
itself like a spider in the web of structuralism, the order of which can then be
scientifically studied. But precisely this movement only repeats the movement of
an essential Hegelian self-reflection: consciousness renounces itself to enter into
the nonconscious; thereby it becomes its own object and now knows under what
law it exists. This knowledge is nothing other than the return from the state of
self-renunciation to the state of absolute self-consciousness.
Formulated in this manner, the thinking of Lvi-Strauss seems to promise very
little hope of an overcoming of metaphysics and its central operator, the concept
of the subject, which apparently he would like to achieve. In the end he admits
that after having studied myth for twenty years he is supported in his conviction
that
the consciousness of the self, the major preoccupation of the whole of
Western philosophy, does not withstand persistent application to the
same object, which comes to pervade it through and through and to im-
bue it with an experiential awareness of its own unreality. For the only
remnant of reality to which it still dares to lay claim is that of being a
"singularity," in the sense in which astronomers use the term. (SM 4,
625; translation slightly modified)
Here that sense of the world is already expressed that so pathetically resounds
from the last lines of Foucault's The Order of Things:
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event
of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility
without knowing either what its form will be or what it promiseswere
to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the
end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man
would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
6
In both statements, Foucault's as well as Lvi-Strauss's, it is not thinking (let's
say, science) that resigns; rather an episteme that was in the service of the modern
subject gives way to another one to which the subject no longer lays claim.
What are the consequences of this for the possible unity of the structure or the
episteme? Lvi-Strauss has to admit, at least, that there is not only one, for if there
were only one, then that scientific progress that elevates the structural episteme
above the modern-day theory of the subject would be uncontrollable. Modern the-
ory of the subject has considered itself the definitive truth of European intellectual
history. At least in this point structuralism on the verge of becoming neostruc-
turalism has a historical consciousness that is more acute: it understands itself as
a theory of the succession of epistemes or structures in analogy to Heidegger's
history of interpretations of Being in ever-new images of the world and ever-new
philosophies. Only one thing is forbidden to this theory of history (at the price
LECTURE 4 U 55
of a relapse into the model of the subject): that is the idea that the structures them-
selves are generated out of something that is itself nonstructural. The hermeneuti-
cist Friedrich Schleiermacher had already eliminated this possibility of retreat
with the phrase: "No newly discovered form is absolutely new."
7
Lvi-Strauss
gives voice to a similar conviction.
Each anterior state of a structure is itself a structure. . . . The process
consists of structures which are undergoing transformation to produce
other structures, so the structure itself is a primordial fact. Less confu-
sion would have occurred in connection with the concept of human na-
ture, that I continue to use, if it had been realized that I do not take it
in the sense of a heap of completed and immutable structures, but
rather with the meaning of matrices giving rise to structures all belong-
ing to the same set, without necessarily remaining identical throughout
any individual existence from birth to adulthood, or, in the case of hu-
man groups, at all times and in all places. (SM 4, 627)
An ambiguity that is characteristic for Lvi-Strauss permeates this passage. On
the one hand, in the first volume of his Mythologiques he rigidly distinguished
between the code or structure (both of which are unalterable), and the framework
of myths (which constantly changes). Now he suddenly asserts the alterability of
structures themselvesnot in the sense that over the period of historical evolution
a structure could ever have been generated out of nothing, as it were, or out of
the deed of an understanding subject, but rather in the sense that the constellation
of structures is in constant change. If one formulates it this way, one cannot avoid
the consequence that therefore also the respective unity of structure(s) is altered
as well. And at this point of our interpretation the text pulls the rug out from under
us. For precisely here Lvi-Strauss brings into play the well-known concept of
transformation, about which we already know that it affects only the content and
meaning of a semiological system, not its values. Now both cannot be the case:
first, that we are only dealing with transformations, and second, that the transfor-
mations alter the structures. Promptly, a subordinated concept surfaces in the
text, namely, that of "matrices giving rise to structures all belonging to the same
set." In short, the earlier concept of a framework is dissolved into that of struc-
ture, and the earlier concept of structure is dissolved into that of a matrix, which
remains identical and establishes continuity throughout all transformations. The
apparent infinity of the succession of structures turns out to be the old and familiar
infinity of contents that one can attribute, one after another, to one and the same
semiological value. Even the interpretation of myths belongs in this chain. "It
takes its place in sequence after the already known variants of that myth" (SM 4,
628); and to clarify what he means, he himself refers to the already cited passage
from Structural Anthropology (226). With that the return to the model of transfor-
mational structuralism is begun.
56 H LF.CTURE 4
What are the consequences of this for the unity and/or openness of structure?
If the succession of structures is accomplished within the framework of a con-
tinuity controlled by matrices, then one cannot possibly avoid the notion of a unity
and a center of meaning for structure. One would not even be able scientifically
to describe and analyze a structure whose elements, as it were, wander about and
swarm out instead of sitting still and remaining where they are. To be sure, some-
thing is wandering about and constantly sliding, and Lvi-Strauss knows this
well. It is the contents through which humankind within the framework of an
identical structure comes to terms with the permanently changing demands of
its situation and its history. In this way the semantic unity of myths is, as it were,
constantly diverted by the peculiarities of the stories in whose guise they present
themselves, and by the peculiarities of the sociohistoric constellations reflected
in the respective mythic narratives; this diversion, however, remains within the
framework of a systematic continuum. A final quote from Lvi-Strauss makes
clear the extent to which his theory is held hostage to metaphysics.
Each version of the myth, then, shows the influence of a twofold deter-
minism: one strand links it to a succession of previous versions or to a
set of foreign versions, while the other operates as it were transver-
sally, through the constraints arising from the infrastructure which
necessitate the modification of some particular element, with the result
that the system undergoes reorganization in order to adapt these differ-
ences to necessities of an external kind. (SM 4, 628-29)
With this Lvi-Strauss gives an almost classical paraphrase of what Jean Piaget
called a system of self-regulation. In order to come to terms with a constantly
changing environment, the game marks of structure have to be exchanged con-
stantly for ones that better stand up to the situation or interpret it more precisely.
The exchanged marks, however, are always inserted into the same position; i.e.,
they reveal themselves to be what they essentially always were: variations or
transformations of a structure identical according to its form. Thus, in the end,
the structuralist principle that a semiological system is a pure form and not a sub-
stance wins out over the objections of historicity and the openness of contents.
However, what if structure in reality were missing a center? What if transfor-
mation emancipated itself from the crystal lattice and actually, not only termino-
logically, corroded the order of discourse; and what if the power of historicity,
which destroys identity, were to intrude into the interior of the structure? Then we
would be standing on the ground of a theory that does not speak from within the
bounds of classical structuralism, but rather oversteps these bounds. We would
stand on the ground of what in this series of lectures is called neostructuralism.
We saw that Lvi-Strauss himself displays a certain ambiguity concerning the
question of whether structures indeed possess no organizing center. On the one
LECTURE 4 G 57
hand, he displaces the unity of mythic structure into the imaginary, or into the
mind of the reader; on the other hand, he characterizes the differences between
various versions and/or readings of a myth as transformations of one and the same
set of matrices that remain formally identical within the changing "frameworks."
This ambiguity only vanishes in the Smantique structurale of Greimas, who,
without hesitation, speaks of a "total meaning" of structure (sens total, significa-
tion intgrale).
8
According to him the process of text structuring goes through
several levels of constitution, corresponding to what we know from Benveniste:
first, the level that combines elementary particles of meaning (semes) in the syn-
thesis of a lexeme/sememe; second, the "classematicar level (i.e., the level of
lexical units in the meaning context of a phrase); third, the level of what he calls
"isotopes" (a level of coherence, whose elements are recurring and semantically
recognized c\asscmc$); and fourth and finally, the level of totality of signification.
Let's concentrate completely on the claim put forward when he talks about a total-
ity of meaning of the text. It implies nothing less than that textual analysis to
be sure, over several steps eventually arrives at the discovery of a simple totality
of meaning, the understanding of which allows for the text to be masterable in
nuce. Precisely this would be the center of meaning, the principle, as it were, that
permits the structuring of meaning to produce this particular text; just as in an
idealist system everything that follows is a necessary consequence of one princi-
ple, even if, as in Hegel, this principle can be recognized in all its simplicity only
in retrospect. In Greimas, classical structuralism reveals particularly clearly its
indebtedness to the project of exact science, the latest manifestation of what
Heidegger and neostructuralism call metaphysics.
We do not as yet know much about the meaning of the concept of
"metaphysics." We are already aware, however, of three pieces of information
that we want to recall here: the first states that "metaphysics" means the belief in
the subsistence of a transsensual world; the second interprets "metaphysics" as a
thinking on the basis of principles; the third seeks to unmask "metaphysics" as
a knowledge for mastery. It can easily be seen how these three interpretations
connect: those who assert a metabeing over against being hope with this assertion
somehow to escape the claim of being-its realm is beyond our world or cannot
be entirely absorbed by it. Those who think on the basis of principles hold being
under the control of thought: nothing may be taken as correct that has not first
passed examination before and on the principle (for example, the principle of
cogito sum). The immediate consequence of this is that metaphysics, including
the procedures of technology and science, is knowledge for mastery: a special
form of what Nietzsche called the "will to power," in the form of the "will to
truth," i.e., a form of knowledge that, by controlling being, seeks to master it in
the name of the recognizing intellect. Structuralism shares with metaphysics, as
we stated earlier, this desire for control and mastery.
Lefs recall at this point the question Derrida asked in "Structure, Sign, and
58 LECTURE 4
Play": what i f the will of metaphysics were grounded in an untenable assumption,
namely, that the structures in which being is disclosed to us as a meaningful con-
text are results of constructive actions that, for their part, are grounded in a prin-
ciple? What if, in other words, structure were dcentrai? "And even today,"
Derrida agrees, "the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the un-
thinkable itself (WD, 279). For where would we end up if the transcendental
place from whence the threads of the structure or of the text are woven to this
or that discursive formation were not itself firm and independent of the process
of structuring?
Somewhere, I do not recall exactly in which text, Roland Barthes picks up the
(biologically somewhat daring) metaphor of a spinning spider that dissolves it-
self, as it were, into its web. This metaphor could be taken as the radical conse-
quence of Saussure's argument that there are meaning and significance only in the
play of distinct sounds. If one develops this thesis further, one would have to con-
clude that a supposed center of structure, insofar as it is conceived as center of
meaning (as signifi transcendantal), cannot possibly be located within or outside
structure. /fit has a distinct meaning, it can only have this distinct meaning in
the differential play of structure itself, i.e., in its difference from other marks of
structure. If this is the case, then this distinct meaning cannot be considered cen-
tral, for it belongs to a structure whose values are all dcentrai and dissminai
as long as this statement is true: all determinateness of meaning is grounded in
differences, "omnis determinatio est negatio" ("negation" here understood in the
sense of "determined negation," meaning "being different than"). Should mean-
ing, on the other hand, which, like a principle, or (to remain within our meta-
phor), like a woven pattern, organizes the texture of structure/text indeed be cen-
tral, then it would be impossible to think it, i.e., to distinguish it. It would thus
not participate in the distinctions of structure itself: as extra structural place it
would be a nonplace, an ou topos, a Utopia.
Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition
unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while
governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical
thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically,
within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the to-
tality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not
part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. (WD, 279)
I would like to illustrate with an example this paradox, which is characteristic for
many Derrida would say, for all great thought systems of Western philoso-
phy. In Fichte's Science of Knowledge it is articulated in particularly drastic fash-
ion. On the one hand, Fichte says, subjectivity, which creates world and mean-
ing, is somewhat outside the system, for, as we know, it creates it. To this extent
it may be called absolute, a term that, translated literally, means "unconditioned."
LECTURE 4 59
On the other hand, Fichte knew quite well that there is determinateness only
where there is difference: without imagining something that in itself is not-1, I
would never be able to grasp the thought of "I" in its determinateness. This insight
Fichte also calls "the law of reflection of all our knowledge [Erkenntnis]: namely,
nothing is recognized as what it is, without thinking at the same time what it is
not."
9
And he adds: "And precisely this characteristic of our knowledge, to recog-
nize something by means of its opposite, means to determine something."
10
Well,
"this characteristic of our knowledge," as formulated by the law of reflection,
does not exclude the most fundamental of all thoughts, that of the world-creating
"I." For when I ask somebody to think him- or herself, then I require that person
to really concentrate in this moment on him- or herself and during that time to
keep everything else out of his or her mind. I say, Think yourself, and to this ex-
tent do not think anything else, and thus do not think: not-I.
11
The paradox I would like to direct your attention to consists in the following:
on the one hand, the I is supposed to be absolute, a thought that does not need
any other thought to be executed (for if it needed another, it would be relative,
i.e., referring to something else); on the other hand, "I" cannot be thought as de-
terminate without contrasting it with something else that is not-I. In Derrida's
mode of speaking one could say the I must be simultaneously outside structure-
as its principle or sens transcendantaI in order to be able to ground it, and it
must be inside structure, for otherwise it would have no "value," i.e., no deter-
minateness as opposed to other just as conceivable thoughts.
Derrida believes this paradox to be characteristic of a certain "desire" {dsir),
as he calls it, which lurks in the background of all scientific systems.
The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based
on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fun-
damental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond
the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be
mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being
implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it
were at stake in the game from the outset. {WD, 279)
One can, I believe, easily grasp what he means. If there were no authority outside
structure and outside its play "of pure differences" (as Saussure called it), then,
we fear, we would be literally and hopelessly caught in the occurrence of structur-
ing. There would be no meaning and no origin and thus also no purpose beyond
what the structural context of assignments and references made possible. What
the apostle says about the Holy Ghost would apply to structure itself (in an en-
tirely secular sense, of course): in it we live, weave, and are.
To strip this sentence of all theological meaning is at the same time to strip
away its metaphysical implications. Derrida, following in Heidegger's footsteps,
considers as "metaphysical" every interpretation of being as such and as a whole
60 U LECTURE 4
that wants to ground its meaning on a principle that is superior to, indeed, re-
moved from that being itself. To be sure, there is nothing in this thought that is
stupendous or unintelligible, for it is true of the Platonic idea, as well as of the
Christian God, Hegel's spirit, and even of scientific abstraction that they explain
what is by relating it to something other, which, in comparison with being in the
emphatic sense, is relatively not (it is even then not, if it declares in a grand inver-
sion this relative not-being as the authentic being T VTO V). The principle,
the ground of explanation, or even only the rationality of a recognized structure,
always implies the notion of a structuring and itself extrastructural center, and
it is precisely this thought, which even Lvi-Strauss cannot escape, that according
to Derrida is untenable. There is no transcendental center, whether one under-
stands it as tutelary meaning, as the principal signified of a text, or as major refer-
ent (P, 45). (I am, by the way, using the expression "transcendental" here and
in what follows in an entirely general sense, referring to the condition of some-
thing that itself is not, but that by virtue of it comes into being [ins Dasein tritt].
Applied to the principle of structure this means that the structuring principle
brings about like the pattern of knitting instructions the construction of the
structure; with relation to the knitting itself, however, it has no absolute exis-
tence. Principles allow things to exist, but they do not exist in the same sense as
that which they serve as the principle to.)
At this point you perhaps want to interject the following: is it really so impor-
tant whether the structure has a center or not? As long as it gives us a framework
within which we can orient our endangered lives it serves its purpose, even with-
out a principle in the background. It protects us as the "mighty fortress," as relia-
ble and stable context of meaning, from the "anxiety" of constant incalculables.
It is perhaps this soothing character of structure, which is conceived as enclosed
in itself, that has led many intellectuals to turn to structuralism with a certain satis-
faction. For behind the abstraction, which in itself would not call forth en-
thusiasm, one has always to assume that a passion is evident if it builds up to a
movement, for example, the passion for being able to orient one's life in and by
means of thought.
Derrida now points out to us the unsettling fact that the unimpedable flow of
time, which until now was hardly even mentioned, does in fact imprint its traces
onto the mighty fortress of the principle, or even onto the self-enclosed structure.
If one looks at the history of culture and philosophy, one finds that the names for
the center or principle of the respective structures of Dasein have constantly
changed. At times it was water, at other times the flickering fire, or at still other
times spirit that was said to be the highest principle. Then again there were times
when it was the idea of the good, energy, the unifying principle, God, rationality,
and finally subjectivity, the will to power, or technology.
From this observation Derrida draws the conclusion or, to be more cautious,
he developed his suspicion that there is no such thing as the simplicity or time-
LECTURE 4 61
less presence of such a structuring principle. He further contests that, even if one
renounces the idea of a centering principle (as does the later Lvi-Strauss), the
power of history exhausts itself in always only triggering transformations of a
structure that in its depth remains formally identical. On the contrary, structures
can decompose, and this can even affect their form; the changes are more than
mere transformations of the always identical.
To back up his suspicion Derrida supplies us with an empirical-historical and
a systematic reason. First the empirical one: If there is something like a center
of the structure of an episteme, why doesn't it remain the same once and for all?
Why is it always succeeded and replaced by new candidates for the position of
the center?
Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different
forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the
West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix-if
you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so ellipti-
cal in order to come more quickly to my principal theme is the deter-
mination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be
shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to
the center have always designated an invariable presence-eidos, arche,
telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) altheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth. (WD, 279-80)
Derrida, following Heidegger, emphasizes that the succession of interpretations
of Being was always accomplished within the framework of a rule, never blindly
or by chance. He emphasizes further that the chain of placeholders of the highest
principle (the series of metaphorical and metonymical substitutions for the ab-
sence of an authentic and originary meaning of structure) developed within a con-
tinuity. They all have in common that they comprehend the meaning of Being as
presence (prsence); as either a sensual or conceptual being-accessible, being-
graspable, or being-attainable of the principle. Yet the main thrust of Derrida's
objection seems to me to be in the indicated direction: Derrida confronts
metaphysics with the question of how it can concede a nonfinitude of interpreta-
tions of Being and, at the same time, hold on to the idea of a structural center.
(I am leaving out Hegel's version of metaphysics, which actually holds in reserve
a statement as to the historicity of interpretations of Being, at the price, however,
of having to take this statement out of historicity itself. The insight into the
historicity of all former philosophy is, for its part, no longer historical, but abso-
lute: the center of an absolute structure.)
We are already familiar with the other objection Derrida puts forward against
the idea of a principle or a closure (clture) of structure. It is of a systematic na-
ture and maintains that even the signification of a structural principle in the
semantic sense of the word "signification"-cannot escape the law of dtermina-
62 G LECTURE 4
tion by means of opposition and thus can constitute itself only within the referen-
tial play of signifiers of structure. As a result, one has to give up the idea that the
blueprint of structure, its transcendental principle, commandeers structure and
keeps it in order from outside of it. One has to concede, on the contrary, that we
are, as Derrida says, entangled in structures and have no possibility of getting
beyond our Being-inside-structures. This objection applies even to Foucault's Ar-
chaeology of Knowledge and his attempt at multiplying the structural center,
while, in the end, merely subduing it by means of discursive regularities. This,
at least, is Derrida's view (who otherwise also orients Foucault in the history of
metaphysics).
This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeol-
ogy, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of
the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of struc-
ture on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play. {WD, 279)
Now we can hold on to a first result from our occupation with Derrida. By means
of a radicalization of the concept of "the structurality of structure," he arrives at
a point where he can abandon a fundamental assumption of what we have called
classical structuralism, namely, the assumption that there is either a center, or
several interdiscursively interwoven centers, or at the very least a formal identity
of structure.
Fine, you will say, but what is Derrida's alternative? How would he have us
think structure? First of all, he introduces a concept of structure, the essence of
which is to get along without a center. This concept he calls and with this we
come across another major concept of neostructuralism"decentering," i.e., dis-
placing outside the center. Actually, "decentering" does not mean that formerly
there was a center of structure that now, like Louis XVI, is taken to the guillotine
in a revolutionary overthrow; rather, the term means that the idea that a structure
in its very essence needs a center and a fixed identity is metaphysical (and thus
illusionary).
But a central presence which has never been itself, has always already
been exiled from itself into its own substitute. The substitute does not
substitute itself for anything which has somehow existed before it.
Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center,
that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that
the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a func-
tion, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions
came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or
origin, everything became discourseprovided we can agree on this
word that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the origi-
nal or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a sys-
LECTURE 4 U 63
tern of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends
the domain and the play of signification infinitely. (WD, 280)
Let's comment on this passage which is so pregnant with meaning. Its basic theme
is, in short, that if structure in its respective form/order is not secured by an ex-
trastructural principle-and it is not then everything is structure and all struc-
turally is an infinite play of differences. Perhaps the term "play" surprises you;
it comes, however, from Saussure, who not only liked to compare language to
a chess game, but also spoke of a "play of differences." The totality of all differen-
tial plays is structure. Thus when Derrida says that "everything is structure," he
does not mean that everything is taxonomy, but rather, every meaning, every sig-
nification, and every view of the world is in flux, nothing can escape the play of
differences, there is no interpretation of Being and the world that is valid in and
of itself and for all times. "To interpret"a hint for hermeneuticstherefore does
not mean that we have to track down something like a self-enclosed and fixed sig-
nification beneath the textual surface, but rather, as Roland Barthes says, "to ap-
preciate what plural constitutes it."
12
Derrida says the same thing in a similar,
yet more fundamental, fashion. If the movement of totalization of a text proves
itself meaningless,
it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite
glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the fieldthat is,
language and a finite languageexcludes totalization. This field is in
effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only be-
cause it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhausti-
ble field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there
is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the
play of substitutions. (WD, 289)
The idea of a self-enclosed totality of the text, as well as the idea of a binding
or objective interpretation, is not hindered by any "effective-historical" prejudices
or by the factor of subjectivity, which is always irksome to science; rather they
fail for structural reasons. They fail because structures can only be thought of as
dcentrai, and because texts without a center cannot give rise to a "central in-
terpretation," that is, one that goes to the very heart of the text. Derrida introduces
at this point the concept of supplementarity, which is significant for his thought
in general (WD, 289). Supplementarity means the fact of a substitution. If there
is no center of structure or of text, then the respective interpretation must substi-
tute for this lack with something, namely, with the interpretation itself. This is
a thought Derrida borrowed from Lvi-Strauss.
13
On the occasion of a discussion
of the status of Being of that undifferentiated substance of the holy, of the mana,
Lvi-Strauss says:
04 U LLLL 1 U K L 4
Mana is in effect all these things. But is it not precisely because it is
none of these things that mana is a simple form, or more exactly, a
symbol in the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged
with any sort of symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols
constituted by all cosmologies, mana would simply be a zero symbolic
value, that is to say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic con-
tent, supplementary to that with which the signified is already loaded,
but which can take on any value required, provided only that this value
still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists put
it, a group-term. (Quoted by Derrida, WD, 290)
In the field of art criticism the early German romanticists already recognized this,
and they considered literary criticism a supplement to an irreducible blemish in
the work of art itself. Derrida comes very close to this thought. 'The movement
of signification," he says-and let me add that this applies to the movement of in-
terpretation as well"adds something, which results in the fact that there is al-
ways more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicari-
ous function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified" {WD, 289). Each
interpretation, indeed, each use of signs, presents, as it were, a suggestion as to
how one can replace the missing central meaning of the text and how one can de-
termine it (provisionally, with reservations). Since the central meaning, how-
ever, is missing, interpretation is not so much a matter of finding (Finden) (finding
presupposes the presence of something that can be found) as Inventing (Erfinden),
i.e., a supplement, an addition to the text. This addition cannot be lasting, for it
has no (objective) correlative in the text, it thus has no permanent place. That is
why it is given to it to "float."
Lacan found an especially memorable formulation for this discomforting fact
when he said that meaning slides underneath its expression or chain of ex-
pressions.
From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the
meaning "insists" but that none of its elements "consists" in the signi-
fication of which it is at the moment capable. . . . We are forced,
then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under
the signifier . . . with an image resembling the wavy lines of the up-
per and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis.
14
I believe that with this conclusion both the structural model of the Cours and the
transformational model of Lvi-Strauss are overcome. We are standing on the
ground of neostructuralism.
Lecture 5
Our reading of Derrida's essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences" gave us a first impression of how neostructuralism steps beyond
the structural model of classical structuralism. We saw that, above all, he rejects
the explicit or implicit assumption that there is something like a principle, a blue-
print, or a central meaning that contains, as though in a nutshell, the essence of
a structure, be it that ofa text or of 'd langue. Now you will rightly say that neither
the Saussure of the Cours nor Lvi-Strauss explicitly makes use of this idea.
Nevertheless, it turns out to be an implication of the taxonomical model of struc-
ture whose analogy to the crystal lattice remained a leitmotif throughout our dis-
cussion. Even without a central meaning holding together the threads of structure,
structure is self-enclosed; for it is structure in the first place only insofar as it is
a finite context of assignments and references among a finite number of oppositive
values. What can be changed in a structure are, at the most, the contentual and
significational attributions, not the order of values itself (we called this the work-
ing hypothesis of "transformational structuralism"). Now Derrida, and also La-
can, launches an attack on the thought of structural closure; the constellation of
values is no longer under attack in the name of transformation, but rather in the
name of its "structurally" itself.
I promised to explain this attack as a historical event through Lyotard and espe-
cially through Foucault. Before one can accomplish something of the sort, how-
ever, one has to understand precisely which event is actually in question, and,
what is more, how it justifies itself. You will hardly take what I have told you
so far for a plausible justification, and you are quite right. Therefore, we should
66 LECTURE 5
begin by taking a closer look at this attack on the structural model. I will do this
on the basis of the interview "Smiologie et grammatologie," which Derrida
granted to Julia Kristeva shortly after his book De la grammatologie appeared.
1
In this interview, Derrida not only reiterates in abbreviated form several central
theses of his Grammatologyand that with a precision and brevity other texts by
this author so often are lacking; he also tries to explain his approach by contrast-
ing it with a certain Saussurean tradition that culminates in structuralism. What
is interesting here is that he by no means understands himself as an opponent of
Saussure, but rather as someone who rescued Saussure's concept of the sign from
its last metaphysical connections, and to this extent merely radicalized it.
2
1 can-
not present this important text in all its details; thus I shall limit my discussion
to what seems to me to be most pressing for a first argumentative examination
of the phenomenon of neostructuralism.
Derrida first admits that Saussure, with his theory of articulation and differen-
tiality of the sign (which was mainly developed in the fourth chapter of his
Cours), came very close to what Derrida himself calls the infinite play of signs
or "le texte (en) gnrale." It is mainly two achievements Derrida definitely wants
to hold on to: first of all, Saussure's insight into the inseparability of signified and
signifier; second, his emphasis on the differential and formal character of the
sign-constituting schematism, i.e., on "the differential and formal character of
semiological functioning" (P, 18), which deny any relation whatsoever between
the material character of the phonic material and langue, Derrida then continues:
for reasons which I don't (yet) want to discuss, Saussure made certain concessions
in his theory. He first of all acceded to the classical-dualistic concept of the sign
and thus to its unconscious metaphysical heritage, despite his insight into the fact
that this designation can only be a preliminary solution ("As regards sign, if I am
satisfied with it, this is simply because I do not know of any word to replace it,
the ordinary language suggesting no other"; CGL, 67).
At this point I have to insert a remark: Derrida was not aware that Saussure,
as is recorded in his posthumously published Notes item, actually considered
replacing his binary concept of the sign with the simple concept of the "seme."
The seme no longer subsists as a synthesis of the (seemingly independent) ele-
ments vocal image and concept, but rather only as an immediate effect of differen-
tial relations which it has to other semes that subsist alongside it. Saussure calls
the differential neighbor-semes "parasemes." Derrida replaces the term "sign"
with "mark" for exactly the same reason.
What should also suffice is the suspicion concerning the sign and even
concerning the opposition signifier/signified: this suspicion, legible in
every line, bears on the entire system that supports this opposition, and
consequently, among others, on that of an intention hidden behind the
LECTURE 5 G 67
"visible sign" (the signifier). Hence, the substitution of "mark" for
"sign," of intentional effect for intention, etc. (LI, 205)
This entanglement in the metaphysical dialectics of signified (signifi) on the one
hand and signifier (signifiant) on the other made it possible for Saussureand this
is Derrida's second observationto grant the signifying part of the sign a certain
preeminence, i.e., to "leave open the possibility of thinking a concept signified
in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relation-
ship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signifiers" (P, 19). This
reproach is correct insofar as Saussure, in his General Linguistics, defends the
view that the significance of an object remains unaltered even when the linguistic
values are displaced.
A few examples will show clearly that this is true. Modern French
mouton can have the same signification as English sheep but not the
same value, and this for several reasons, particularly because in speak-
ing of a piece of meat ready to be served on the table, English uses
mutton and not sheep. The difference in value between sheep and mut-
ton is due to the fact that sheep has beside it a second term while the
French word does not. (CGL, 115-16)
Here we are touching on a problematic aspect of reading Saussure that has some-
thing to do with the problem of translatability from one language to the other.
Derrida grants the necessity of respecting this possibility; he suggests, however,
the following terminological change:
In the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, trans-
lation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But if this
difference is never pure, no more so is translation, and for the notion of
translation we would have to substitute a notion of transformation: a
regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by an-
other. (P, 20)
This objection essentially boils down to the recommendation that we give up the
distinction between meaning (signified/signification) which, after all, is only
one side of the sign and value (valeur), the differential determination of the sign.
Derrida argues that one should not exclude the determination of meaning from
the play of the parasemes, as Saussure's sheep/mutton and mouton example sug-
gests. In an interview with Henri Ronse, "Implications," from 1967, Derrida sup-
ported this recommendation with an interesting additional argument.
The movement of diffrance, as that which produces different things,
that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional
concepts that mark our language, such as, to take only a few examples,
sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture, etc. (P, 9)
68 G LECTURE 5
That means that it would be senseless to work with a two-sided concept of the
sign, if, at the same time, one accepts that the two sides of a sign, signifier and
signified, are not originary, but rather themselves derive their difference on the
basis of differentiation/articulation of values.
In a third objection, Derrida states that Saussure privileged the phonic aspect
of the sign, although he himself asserted that the phonic is foreign to the essence
of language (CGL, 7, 118). In other passages, however, he speaks of a "natural
link" (CGL, 25) between voice and thought (P, 21).
This, in turn, results, fourth, in an unexpected reliance on the part of Saussure
on the old Western idea that has found its most beautiful formulations in Hegel;
namely, that "phone, in effect, is the signifying substance given to consciousness
as that which is most intimately tied to the thought of the signified concept. From
this point of view, the voice is consciousness itself (P, 22). This objection seems
unimportant if not unintelligibleon first sight. Derrida, however, in his publi-
cations that concern themselves with Husserl and, above all, in his Grammatol-
ogy, has demonstrated quite convincingly and supported with profuse examples
that, according to a metaphor deeply etched in European grammar, the voice, in
contrast to writing, for example, was considered more spiritual, more closely
related to breath, which, itself, is considered to be spiritual. In light of this in-
terpretation one can hardly reject Derrida's fifth objection, in which he complains
about a psychologization of semiology (P, 22-23). Whereas sounds are heard,
the voice is perceived. That is a fundamental difference: perception is not hear-
ing, but rather implies understanding. If voice {la phone) itself is already spiritual
in its essence, then in perceiving the speaking voice one intellect, as it were,
speaks to another: "The exteriority of the signifier seems reduced" (P, 22). (At
this point I want to interject something into Derrida's criticism of Saussure: Der-
rida seems to me to pay little attention to the fact that the voice has the advantage
of being one-dimensional and that it is this circumstance that assures it its privi-
leged status from Hegel through Saussure, and not its metaphorical nonsensual-
ity.
3
Only in the flow of speech can semes be parasemically distinguished from
each other, i.e., transformed into distinct values.)
I do not want to decide to what extent this last reproach actually touches the
historical Saussure and not merely his editors and successors, who took many
freedoms. Derrida himself relies mainly on Saussure's structuralist successors,
particularly on Roman Jacobson who, indeed, plays a key role in the history of
European structuralism. Be that as it may, in the thus interpreted Saussure Der-
rida takes exception, sixth and finally, to the fact that he oriented himself on an
untenable model of communication that itself, in turn, was burdened by the un-
derlying concept of the sign.
This equivocality, which weighs upon the model of the sign, marks the
"semiological" project itself and the organic totality of its concepts, in
LECTURE 5 D 69
particular that of communication, which in effect implies a transmission
charged with making pass, from one subject to another, the identity of a
signified object, of a meaning or of a concept rightfully separable from
the process of passage and from the signifying operation. Communica-
tion presupposes subjects (whose identity and presence are constituted
before the signifying operation) and objects (signified concepts, a
thought meaning that the passage of communication will have neither to
constitute, nor, by all rights, to transform). A communicates B to C.
Through the sign the emitter communicates to a receptor, etc. (P,
23-24)
From this we get an idea about the point Derrida wants to put his finger on: it
is the question of whether structure can guarantee the semantic identity of the sign
either during the exchange or during two different usages of it. From now on
when I say "semantic identity," I mean the presupposition that the meaning of a
sign, insofar as it is an element in the crystal lattice of langue or of discours, is
not altered in the course of communication. All of classical structuralism rests
on this assumption, and even large parts of Anglo-Saxon language philosophy
presuppose the semantic identity of the linguistic sign, for example Searle, when
he says that "any conventional act involves the notion of repetition of the same."
4
This assumption rests, according to Derrida, on an ambiguity in the concept of
"structure."
5
Everything depends upon the use to which it is put. We already know
one: it is the application in communication theory, which assumes that for the
sake of its transmittability a sign must be able to be attributed by the listener or
reader to the same completed system of langue out of which it was generated by
the speaker or author. Thus the signifier would be a mere medium that transplants
the signified from one brain to another, it would simply be an indispensable in-
strument of transportation. This view, however, is incompatible with Saussure's
idea of articulation, which, in a radical form, says no more and no less than that
there is no meaning where there is no expression. Yet expression, for its part,
is not indigenously at hand; rather it is the effect of oppositive differentiations
from other expressions. But who could possibly know in advance how many other
expressions I distinguish my expression from? Saussure's law of the differential
determination of value simply states that the value of a term is what distinguishes
it from other terms. The chain of negations ("a is not b and not c and not d, etc.")
presumably runs ad infinitum: in the end, it is up to the individual's interpretive
and linguistic competence, indeed, even imagination, to decide which term it dis-
tinguishes from which other terms in what manner, and with which terms it as-
sociates it (metaphorically, metonymically). Thus nothing requires that one con-
nect the structurality of sign articulation with the idea of enclosed structure. If
this is the case, classical structuralism has become untenable and with it that type
of communication theory that wagers that a content encoded according to rules
must be decoded by a speaker of the same competence in the exact same way.
70 U LECTURE 5
For this to occur, one would have to assume that in the head of every competent
speaker the exact same quantity of established oppositions has to be associated
with each terman assumption that gives us a vivid picture of the passionate
denial of reality that can be found in the project of scientific idealization and mas-
tery of reality. Actual communication, in contrast to the wishful thinking of struc-
tural science, is semantically uncontrollable and completely incompatible with
that deterministic machine that underlies the model of input-output. We can note
this as the second conclusion of our reading of Derrida: the differentiality of the
formation of signs in no way implies the systematicality of structure. On the
contrary,
This principle [of difference] compels us not only not to privilege one
substance-here the phonic, so called temporal, substance-while ex-
cluding anotherfor example, the graphic, so called spatial,
substance-but even to consider every process of signification as a for-
mal play of differences. That is, of traces.
Why traces? And by what right do we introduce grammatics at the
moment when we seem to have neutralized every substance, be it
phonic, graphic, or otherwise? Of course it is not a question of resort-
ing to the same concept of writing and of simply inverting the dissym-
metry that now has become problematical. It is a question, rather, of
producing a new concept of writing. This concept can be called gram
or diffrance. The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and
referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple
element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in
the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a
sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply
present. This interweaving results in each "element"-phoneme or
grapheme-being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the
other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is
the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing,
neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever
simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and
traces of traces. (P, 26)
Actually, this passage tells us nothing new, yet one feels slightly at a loss with
Derrida's statement, presumably because he employs in an exemplary fashion a
technique he calls "deconstruction." It consists in adapting the classical terminol-
ogy of semiology, but then wearing it out through use, and thus distorting and
deforming it in such a way that the Western-metaphysical (Derrida likes to say
"logocentric") implications are avoided wherever possible. Let's take a closer
look at this process. There is first the concept of the trace, which also, to be sure,
has its Western, for example, Humboldtian tradition, but which appears rather
as a troublemaker in a Saussurean context. "Trace" denotes the being-related-to-
LECTURES D 71
one-another of distinct elements. So far, so good. But why does he designate this
condition of being-related with a new, artificial term, diffrancel Obviously,
Derrida is not satisfied with Saussure's term diffrence. For traditional thinking
can deal with difference. Let me remind you of Hegel, who makes short work
of difference, sublating it in the reconstructed "simple unity" of the spirit which
is present to itself. Derrida does not have in mind such a preliminary difference,
which, in the end, can be subordinated to system or to structure. For the differen-
tiality of the trace is not supposed to come to a standstill in a closed system of
signs, i.e., not in a taxonomically understood "text." "Texts," Derrida says, are
always transformations of other texts; signs transformations of other signs. Lvi-
Strauss said this, as you might recall, in the "Finale" of his Mythologiques in al-
most the same words. But the difference between his and Derrida's formulation
is that in his model the transformation leaves structure intact, whereas it in-
fluences it in Derrida's conception. And why? Because for Derrida the thought
of difference simultaneously implies that no sign, as he says, is immediately pres-
ent to itself.
This is not an easily graspable formulation. Let's make an effort to understand
it: Its comprehension (Verstndnis) will essentially decide whether we can join
sides with neostructuralism and its critique of systems, or whether we want rather
to remain with metaphysics. "No sign is ever present to itself means that if a sign
acquires its determined meaning only through distinction from all other signs,
then it obviously does not refer first to itself. Rather, it takes the detour, so to
speak, over all other signs of the system, and only thereafter does it come back
to itself identifiably. Thus one could actually say that it is separated from itself
by nothing less than the universe of all other signs and texts, if one wants to
establish the argument on the level of the text. This means that difference is more
primordial than (ursprunglicher als) identity: a statement that has scarcely
fathomable consequences if we decide to go along with it. If one does this, one
already stands outside metaphysics, which, after all, always grants to one element
of the system (or outside the system), i.e., to the center or the principle, the fea-
ture of being immediately familiar with itself.
Today we cannot possibly overlook the consequences of Derrida's thesis. The
course of this lecture series will, we hope, bring us to a point where we will be
more familiar with some of them. For today I want to avoid leaving the context
in which Derrida's interview moves. This context is Saussure's theory of the sign
and the system. Let's then ask ourselves what consequences Derrida's diffrance
might have for the reinterpretation of Saussure's Cours.
The most striking consequence would be the destruction of Saussure's concept
of opposition. Saussure places a limit on the "play of differences": once the values
of a linguistic system are established by means of the differentiating activity, he
believes, one must no longer speak of differences, but rather of oppositions. Op-
72 U LECTURE 5
positions are fixed differences between terms, and as such they have a clear iden-
tity with themselves, which Saussure regards as positive.
Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and
negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive
fact. (CGL, 120)
To be sure, the origin of the opposing elements is negation or differentiality, but
their purpose, the condition they enter by virtue of being oppositions, is the posi-
tivity of a fixed self-reference, of a unity or an identity. If the signs were not iden-
tical with themselves, langue would not be a system', i.e., there would be in-
numerable differential references, and the ultimate identification of the meaning
of the signs would have to fail. In fact, however, Saussure speaks of the "system
of language," and "system" means, literally, coexistence of many under one cen-
tral concern. If this central concern is absent from the free "play of differences"
in its pure negativity, this does not mean, Saussure explains, that it is also absent
from the linguistic system, viewed no longer as a limited context of assignments
and references among values, but rather as one among fixed terms ("When we
compare signs positive terms with each other, we can no longer speak of
difference, . . . Between them there is only opposition"; CGL, 121). In other
words, as soon as differentiation as articulation of the sound and image material
is complete, we are dealing with positivities (with terms and oppositions), and
no longer with pure negativities, about which Saussure had said earlier that "in
language there are only differences without positive terms" (CGL, 120).
In an insightful essay, Samuel Weber has identified this transition from the
anarchical power of differentiation to a transparent order of oppositions as a con-
tradiction in Saussure's approach.
6
And he also added that this contradiction is
linked to Saussure's (or rather Bally and Sechehaye's) systematical interest. For
if both were simultaneously true (first, that in language there are no positivities,
but only negative relations; and second, that language is a finite arsenal of signs),
a transition from the free play of differences to the fixed referentiality of opposi-
tions would necessarily have to be found. The only question is, What authority
determines the free play of relations? Saussure gives a cautious answer to this
question. He says that the unity of concern that allows the free play of differences
to become a fixed context of assignments and references of oppositions is supplied
by the unity of a collective consciousness ("by the collective mind"; CGL, 100).
How, one might ask, can we imagine this unifying of the linguistic material
by means of a collective consciousness, if, at the same time, it is supposed to be
true that thought in itself is amorphous and articulated only through the free play
of differences? Saussure, indeed, seems to correct his fundamental insight into
the inseparability of sound and thought when he says that "maintaining the paral-
lelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the lin-
guistic institution" (CGL, 121).
LECTURE 5 n 73
But if, inversely, the so-called collective consciousness of the participants in
language is a result of articulation, it cannot appear at the same time as determin-
ing authority in the service of a system. This, in turn, seems to imply that the
boundary between oppositions and differences can never be fixed. Saussure had,
for his part, expressed this opinion already at an earlier point of his Cours when
he stated:
The synchronic law is general but not imperative. Doubtless it is im-
posed on individuals by the weight of collective usage (see p. 73), but
here I do not have in mind an obligation on the part of speakers. I
mean that in language no force guarantees the maintenance of a
regularity when established on some point. (CGL, 92)
Derrida is of the exact same opinion, namely, that the text is infinite and that the
signs cannot be identified (with themselves) with absolute certainty, either before-
hand or afterward. For in differential systems, he says, there is no (final) authority
whatsoever that defines its limits. Each speech act is a continuing test of whether
the other speakers articulate their ideas in a similar fashion. There is no policing
of language, as he says in "Limited Inc": "Everything becomes possible against
the language-police; for example, 'literatures' or 'revolutions' that as yet have no
model" (243; see also 250); and that is because the radicalized thought of differen-
tiality of structure suspends the ideaor at least renders it untenable that there
is an extrastructural principle (and be it even the identity of a collective conscious-
ness) that watches over its unity.
In discussions of Derrida's criticism of Saussure one often comes across the
objection that his criticism of the system of language and of the unity of meaning
goes too far, indeed, that it is senseless when it posits as absolute the "structurality
of structure." Deviations and transformations that can no longer be recognized
as deviations from something (which to this extent has to remain identical with
itself) are no longer deviations. Even the notion of an "unlimited play of differ-
ences" must, for that reason, insist on a minimum of uniformity among the signs.
Without giving a final answer to this question, I would like to add at this point
by way of explanation that Derrida explicitly admits this, most clearly in section
o of his "Limited Inc." There he says that there is a certain constancy of the sign.
Yet this constancy ought not be misunderstood as "permanence," i.e., in the sense
of a timeless self-presence of a meaning; rather it should be interpreted as a kind
of non-self-present "remainder" (LI, 187). Restance is a neologism born of the
caution that the idea of the conservation of a sign's signification over the course
of its innumerable uses could include a metaphysical assumption. Namely, if it
is true that each new usage of a sign can contest the meaning of the first use, then
vve are dealing not with a mere eventuality but rather with a structural possibility
(LI, 184). Structural possibilities are not refuted by de facto arguments, and thus
not by the objection that this use of signs did in fact not alter the meaning of the
74 G LECTURE 5
sign. A sufficiently fundamental theory of language has to account for this contes-
tant and irrefutable possibility. Yet if the signification of a sign can be altered,
then a timeless-synchronous self-presence (prsence soi) of meaning can in any
case be excluded: "The structure of the remainder, implying alteration, renders
all absolute permanence impossible" (LI, 191). To grant this is not, inversely, to
assert that there is no expectancy whatsoever about the attribution of meaning for
signs. For precisely this reason Derrida speaks of a nonpresent remainder: some-
thing remains, but what is remaining is not the self-presence of a meaning, not
even the permanence of the phonic or graphic material by means of which mean-
ing is expressed; it is rather something like the schematic unity of a sign, about
which Schleiermacher said that it is a unity with movable edges that can even wipe
out or newly determine the presumed kernel of meaning. Let's see how Derrida
himself (to be sure, only in a preliminary fashion) responds to our doubts.
Iterability supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of
idealization) in order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and
identifiable in, through, and even in view of its alteration. For the struc-
ture of iterationand this is another of its decisive traits implies both
identity and difference. Iteration in its "purest" formand it is always
impurecontains in itself the discrepancy of a difference that constitutes
it as iteration. The iterability of an element divides its own identity a
priori, even without taking into account the fact that this identity can
only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other
elements and that it hence bears the mark of this difference. It is be-
cause this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as
well as between the "elements," because it splits each element while
constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the
remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling
presence: it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence or
the (simple or dialectical) opposition of presence and absence, upon
which opposition the idea of permanence depends. This is why the
mark qua "non-present remainder" is not the contrary of the mark as
effacement. Like the trace it is, the mark is neither present nor absent.
This is what is remarkable. . . . It is iterability itself, that which is
remarkable in the mark, passing between the re- of the repeated and the
re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition. (LI, 190)
The main argument (but, at the same time, the main difficulty) of this passage
seems to me to lie in the statement that differentiation not only divides one sign
from others (qua oppositum) but that it already divides the unity of this sign itself
by virtue of its irrefutable possibility of repetition. So that you can more easily
familiarize yourself with this difficult, but in no way unintelligible, thought, I
want to present to you Derrida's own explanation of the concept of "diffrence."
First of all, he says, the occurrence of diffranee can no longer be explained on
LECTURE 5 U 75
the basis of the opposition of signifier and signified, nor on that of absence and
presence.
Diffrance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differ-
ences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each
other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of
diffrance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity,
that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of
this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full"
terms would not signify, would not function. (P, 27)
In French the verb diffrer has two meanings: to establish a distance between two
conditions of a thing (thus, "to delay," also in the sense of "to defer") and, "to be
different." In diffrance both meanings are present. The interval that separates
meaning from meaning and thus determines it, is, at the same time, the deferral
of presence on the basis of which meaning is not simple and immediately present
to itself: full, saturated, atemporal, identical with itself. La diffrance has the os-
cillation of the term between active and passive in common with Humboldt's ener-
geia (as opposed to the product as ergon). We have to imagine both as vital and
historical processes: deferral presupposes temporality. It is time that separates
one meaning from another and thus thwarts its self-presence. For time, according
to a famous definition taken from Hegel's Encyclopaedia, is "Being which, be-
cause it is, is not, and is because it is nof:
1
i.e., the contradiction of Dasein or
the nonpresence of Dasein.
The espacement, the spatial separation of signs, has therefore its raison d'tre
in temporization. Only temporality allows the rupture with all options for syn-
chrony or presence.
This is why the a of diffrance also recalls that spacing is temporiza-
tion, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, percep-
tion, consummationin a word, the relationship to the present, the
reference to a present reality, to a being'art always deferred. Deferred
by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element
functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring
to another past or future element in an economy of traces. (P, 28-29)
Indeed, two sign values can be distinguished from each other only if both do not
abide in the present, but rather pass on so that one can make room for the other.
This is the only way the ideality of a sign meaning, released from its material bag-
gage (sunken into the past), can come to light. If time, however, is the condition
of possibility of articulation and of differentiality, then it would be very strange
to believe that it could be frozen into an idealized concept, like that of the system
of language. No, not even as values in a supposedly "synchronic" system do the
signs have (timeless) presence: they are divided not only from their other signs
76 LECTURE 5
(as their opposita), but also from themselves, simply because their ^//exists in
time, i.e., it is a being that, because it is, is not, and is, only because it is not.
To close this part of today's lecture I am going to cite a passage from Derrida's
interview in which the classical structuralist concept of structure, understood as
a system of simultaneous oppositions, is both taken up as well as critically over-
come. It is exactly by reason of this movement that we speak of "neostruc-
turalism."
The activity or productivity connoted by the a of differance refers to the
generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither
fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a
static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could ex-
haust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this van-
tage the theme of differance is incompatible with the static, synchronic,
taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure. But it goes
without saying that this motif is not the only one that defines structure,
and that the production of differences, differance, is not astructural: it
produces systematic and regulated transformations which are able, at a
certain point, to leave room for a structural science. The concept of
differance even develops the most legitimate principled exigencies of
"structuralism." (P, 27-28)
We now have at our disposal after the reading of two texts by Derrida-not
only a definition of what is meant by "neostructuralism" but also a first illustration
of its content and methods. Neostructuralism radicalizes Saussure's basic idea ac-
cording to which the meaning of the speech acts, by means of which we com-
municate with each other, is grounded for its part in something that itself is
not meaningful, namely, in the differential play of what the later Saussure calls
"semes" and Derrida "marks" or "nonpresent marks." The fundamental struc-
turalist idea is radicalized insofar as it now challenges even the concept of tax-
onomy, ofa self-enclosed structure of signs governed by asetof rules. Theclosed
text is confronted by the open text, interpretation (as search for the central mean-
ing of a text) by plural reading that does not look for a unified meaning but rather
is interested in semantic "dissemination."
So far, so good. You will say, however, that one example does not make a
rule, and Derrida's texts do not constitute a large enough basis to justify our use
of the term "neostructuralism." Before I come back to Derrida, I therefore want
to broaden the terrain on which we are working by introducing other names and
voices; at the same time, I want to study neostructuralism under a historical per-
spective. The second part of my program for today one could also characterize
as follows: primarily on the basis of The Order of'Things, I want to clarify the
actual historical presuppositions on the basis of which the thought of an open
structure and of a nonrepresentational concept of the sign could emerge. The
LECTURE 5 H 77
historical question will turn into a question about the essence of history over the
course of our investigation.
Not very long ago people looked at the number of individual histories in which
mankind is entangled under the collective concept of history (in the singular). In
Germany, it was mainly the works of the historian Reinhart Koselleck that
pointed to that so-called turning point (Sattekeit) around 1750in which the
event of the unification of the many histories under one (universal) history took
place. Foucault, mainly in The Order of Things, made the same observation, and
placed this turn, on the basis of data from French culture, at almost the same point
in time, the year 1775. We will learn more about this when we engage in the dis-
cussion of Foucault's major works. For now a single observation should suffice:
the overcoming of histories is an ambiguous process. On the one hand, it emanci-
pates the power of time that is at work in the historical process-it destroys the
idea of a universal reason that is valid for all time and that in an exemplary fashion
manifests itself in all individual histories. On the other hand, it also furthers the
expansion of the concept of reason insofar as from now on not only what exists
in space but also what exists in time will be subordinate to reason. In this sense
one was able to celebrate Hegel's philosophy of spirit and history as the greatest
triumph of Western rationality, succeeding for the first time in understanding
even the facts of history as manifestations of reason. To apply the concept of unity
to history already points to this kind of appropriation, for one could scarcely
speak of one history (as opposed to many histories) if one had not already con-
ceived the totality of history under the perspective of its possible unity of mean-
ing, i.e., as a meaningfully unfolding process. If one calls, with Foucault, the age
that concludes with the discovery of history the age of representation or the age
of structure, one would have to characterize the period after 1750 or 1775 as the
age that broke with the model of representation in the name of history. And in-
deed, this is what Michel Foucault does. On the other hand-and this would be
more or less the opinion of Derrida or of Jean-Franois Lyotard (to mention only
them at this point)-universal history itself displays a structural similarity with
the thinking of representation or of structure insofar as it orients the decentering
power of time around the concept of a unity that history always and unforgettably
imagines as its final aim. Philosophy calls this teleology: the direction of a process
toward a telos (x^o). This idea would allow us to grasp history as completed
or as capable of completion, as Hegel does, for example.
Hegel-as we said in one of our first lectures-still, as it were, finds a place
in the closed construction of Western history: he is still "at home" in the West,
to employ a metaphor he liked to use. He experiences its completion from within,
for the idea that a history of the West is completed with consciousness of itself
still belongs to metaphysics (i.e., to Western thought).
This is no longer true for neostructuralisnfs interpretation of modern times.
For Jean-Franois Lyotard, whose book The Postmodern Condition we have al-
78 U LECTURE 5
ready mentioned, thinking of the future is postmodern; i.e., it looks at the closed
(or supposedly closed) house of metaphysics as if from the outside, without itself
still being a resident. This looking in from the outside is a standard metaphor of
neostructuralism. I am sure that some of you know the statement that we should
"observe our civilization with the eyes of an anthropologist." That means that one
cannot be a member of society and identify with its customs; rather one has to
observe it as a theoretician, with the alienating gaze of someone who does not
belong to it. It is precisely this perspective that Lyotard chooses with regard to
modern times. Its agony and final decline represent themselves to him in the
gradual perishing of its legitimation. From a West German perspective this point
of view is both strange and exciting at the same time. Our philosophy has for quite
some time been struggling with the question of a "legitimation of modern times,"
as it was formulated (and answered positively) by Hans Blumenberg in his book
of the same title; it has likewise been excited by the question that, above all, Jur-
gen Habermas brought to our attention, namely, the question of how one can
overcome the loss of legitimation of the modern state. The first deals with a de-
fense of modern rationality against either theological, political, or ecological
doubts about its humanistic substance; in other words, it treats the simple but con-
sequential question of whether reason that has become autonomous redeems hu-
mankind from the constraints of nature, or whether it enslaves humankind by
means of new, even worse constraints, indeed, whether it threatens humankind
with extermination. (That is the question raised by Adorno and Horkheimer's Di-
alectic of Enlightenment.) The second question concerns itself with what since
romanticism and Marx is called the alienation of state and society. The formula-
tion means, as you know, that in societies that function on a capitalist basis the
system of means (economy, administration, social labor, etc.) no longer serves
the ends of politics, i.e., no longer reflects the value decisions that can be obtained
through consensus of the citizens. However, since, according to the idea of
democracy, politics derives its legitimacy from the agreement of rationally gener-
alizable decisions by the citizens, the state, as the administrator of the general
will, loses its legitimacy under the described conditions. Niklas Luhmann, the
main representative of the so-called systems theory of society, contests in the face
of this the view that the need for legitimacy can be reduced to that of legality:
factual legality is substituted in this view for the "old European" concept of a
"counterfactual" legitimation on the basis of reason. As the title of one of his
books, Legitimation durch Verfahren (Legitimation by means of procedure),
drastically shows, he believes that nostalgic longings for legitimation can be
soothed by means of procedureby the state's handling of its monopoly of power
in such a way that the question of a possible (normative) legality of its decrees
becomes a question of the examination of its actual agreement with the constitu-
tion.
8
The problem is that this factual criterion can be claimed by any state, even
LECTURE 5 79
Chile; there is, after all, an ultraconservative tradition, as Luhmann knows, for
example, in the prefascism of Carl Schmitt.
I am mentioning the names of Habermas and Luhmann because Lyotard him-
self does so. He is one of the few thinkers of neostructuralism who commands
some knowledge of contemporary German (and Anglo-Saxon) philosophy. This
makes the dialogue with his work an exciting event for a German reader. How-
ever, I have to limit my discussion to what is significant for our present context.
When Lyotard defines "postmodernity" as the inapplicability of modernism's
traditional means to legitimate society, we are mainly interested in this idea from
the point of view of whether it contains something analogous to the opening of
the system (or of structure). And this is indeed the case. For Lyotard is working
with a three-step scheme. According to this scheme, scientific knowledge has
overcome a form of social self-legitimation that stood at the beginning of this de-
velopment. In the beginningin premodernity-the European cultures and civili-
zations justified themselves by means of narratives, rcits, (for example, mythic
narratives). This option was succeeded by the universal, no longer narrative-
mythical, but rather rational legitimation requirement of scientific discourse. The
claim for universality of the scientific discourse of legitimation, however, has
shown itself to be flawed today, because it brings into play an assumption that,
for itself, cannot be justified; namely this: there is a philosophical metadiscourse
that is superior to all other language games and unifies them. Structuralism, too,
with its characteristic claims to universality that we encountered in Saussure and
especially in Lvi-Strauss, takes part in this assumption (and has this in common
with Luhmann's "systems theory" as well as Habermas's "universal pragmatics").
In reality, there is no universal grammar that encompasses the individual lan-
guage games, and thus the difference or dissemination of linguistically codified
"forms of life" or "language games" is pragmatically insurmountable. The closed,
but universally conceived, system is confronted by the open system, or the plural-
ity of systems, which are never unified in a metadiscourse. Let me give you a
longer passage from the introduction to Lyotard's book.
Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yard-
stick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the ex-
tent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and
seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It
then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status,
a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate
any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of
this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of
the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. For example,
the rule of consensus between the sender and addressee of a statement
with truth-value is deemed acceptable if it is cast in terms of a possible
80 LECTURE 5
unanimity between rational minds: this is the Enlightenment narrative,
in which the hero of knowledge works toward a good ethico-political
end universal peace. As can be seen from this example, if a metanar-
rative implying a philosophy of history is used to legitimate knowledge,
questions are raised concerning the validity of the institutions governing
the social bond: these must be legitimated as well. Thus justice is con-
signed to the grand narrative in the same way as truth.
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity to-
ward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of pro-
gress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the
obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation cor-
responds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the
university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative func-
tion is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great
voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative lan-
guage elements narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descrip-
tive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valencies
specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of
these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combi-
nations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessar-
ily communicable.
Thus the society of the future falls less within the province of a
Newtonian anthropology (such as structuralism or systems theory) than
a pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language
games a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions
in patches-local determinism.
The decision makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of
sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which
implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is de-
terminable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters
of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that
power is based on its optimizing the system's performance efficiency.
The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a
certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is,
commensurable) or disappear.
The logic of maximum performance is no doubt inconsistent in many
ways, particularly with respect to contradiction in the socioeconomic
field: it demands both less work (to lower production costs) and more
(to lessen the social burden of the idle population). But our incredulity
is now such that we no longer expect salvation to rise from these incon-
sistencies, as did Marx.
Still, the postmodern condition is as much a stranger to disenchant-
ment as it is to the blind positivity of delegitimation. Where, after the
metanarratives, can legitimacy reside? The operativity criterion is tech-
nological; it has no relevance forjudging what is true or just. Is
LECTURE 5 D 81
legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jur-
gen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heter-
ogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissen-
sion. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it
refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate
the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the
inventor's paralogy. (PC, xxiii-xxv)
I decided to cite almost unabridged the introduction to Lyotard's book so that you
can familiarize yourself not only with his central themes and theses but also with
the discernible feeling for life that makes itself apparent between the lines. Let's
summarize briefly his essential statements: while premodern societies legitimated
themselves by means of (mythic or religious) narratives, modernism invented the
new paradigm of social legitimation by means of universalization of the require-
ment for legitimation that first appeared in the exact sciences, namely, legitima-
tion on the basis of a discourse of rationality. Lyotard also calls it metadiscourse,
for itsuspended above all individual discourses and transcending their par-
ticularityformulates the pure form of legitimate speech as such in which all in-
dividual discourses take part insofar as they themselves step forward with the
claim of speaking legitimately: enlightened reason; the absolute spirit of the
idealists; the subject of the working class in Marx's theory; the system of the
structuralists and systems theoreticians; the universal discourse, which is free of
domination, of the pragmatic consensus theory la Peirce, Habermas, and Apel.
Lyotard seeks to prove that although these theoreticians are opposed to each other
on ideological grounds, they nevertheless share a common assumption: the claim
to universality and with it the ambition to set one homogeneous medium of ration-
ality above all individual discourses (i.e., above all language games). To this ex-
tent, according to Lyotard, the most important contemporary opponents, systems
theory of society and the Critical Theory of the more recent Frankfurt School,
are in agreement. The former is working with a code model that both guarantees
the identicality of input and output and that places mechanical operability above
the question of the possible meaning of an operation. The latter links the question
of meaning to a social consensus, which, at the same time, has to be conceived
as universal for the sake of its rationality, and which thus violates the heter-
ogeneity of the individual language games in whose irreducible variety we articu-
late our private and social life.
9
In this context Lyotard expresses a wish we do
not want to take foremost as an argument, but rather as the expression of an image
of the world, namely, the wish for innovation, for the change of each encrusted
code. Lyotard also adds that the dissent of innovative changes in meaning offers
more advantageous conditions than the universal "consensus obtained through
discussion."
I presume that, in spite of the differences in style and theme, you can get an
82 [ 1 LECTURE 5
idea of the similarities of the intellectual climate in which Derrida's and Lyotard's
discourses unfold. Both break with all varieties of totalitarian thinking (which
here denotes thinking that aims at the interpretation of the world as totality); for
both the idea of a closed system is unbearable; both stand on the side of innova-
tion, of systematically uncontrollable change in meaning; both emphasize differ-
ence, indeed, irreducible variety rather than uniform unity and singularity of lan-
guage games. In the work of both, the term "dissemination" plays an important
role, and both believe, as we will see later, that even the fundamental idea of
modern-day philosophy the idea of the subject which is identical with itself and
which constitutes world must fall victim to it. And both borrow in this context
in a certain sense from Nietzschean vitalism, which suspected rational consensus
and the morality founded on it of being a conspiracy of the many and the weak
against the less numerous strong and nonmoral individuals who, however,
justifiably act in accord with the will to power. It is not the supposed truth, but
the powerfulness (understood completely in a vital, life-conserving and life-
intensifying sense), the force of an argument that determines its possible truth;
the pretended will to truth unmasks itself, viewed discourse strategically, as a par-
ticularly sly variant of the will to power. Speech-act theory, which goes back to
Wittgenstein's pragmatism, had, as Derrida emphasized in his argument with
Austin and Searle, revalidated the notion that arguments are actions that have a
certain power that initially is articulated not in terms of truth or falsehood but
rather in terms of strength or weakness. Indeed, we rarely call arguments (even
logical ones) "true" or "false," but rather "weak" or "strong" or "compelling" etc.
Here is what Lyotard concludes from this.
This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our
method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and
speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics. This does not
necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made
for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that la-
bor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by litera-
ture? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of
words and meanings, the process behind the evolution of language on
the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a
feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary at least one ad-
versary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.
This idea of an agonistics of language should not make us lose sight
of the second principle, which stands as a complement to it and governs
our analysis: that the observable social bond is composed of language
"moves." An elucidation of this proposition will take us to the heart of
the matter at hand. (PC, 10-11)
Lyotard believes that this fundamental reality of the adversary character of all
speech is neglected in all sociological concepts that work with the model of a self-
LECTURH 5 3 83
regulating mechanism. According to him, all social technologies of the type of
Luhmann's systems theory belong in this category. In contrast to them, Marx's
theory of class struggle has obvious advantages. However, it is weakened and
deradicalized by its Utopian perspective-a thought that is hardly intelligible in
a contemporary German context. Class struggle is for Marx, and even more so
for the Frankfurt School, only a transitional condition, which, like Hegel's differ-
ence, is sublated for the sake of a new, no longer agonal, totality. The idea of
such a totality, however, is part of modernism's heritage: for a thinking under the
condition of the closure of modernity, it no longer has validity.
This certainly sounds strange to a generation educated in the spirit of German
idealism and its successor theories (and Marxism as well as Critical Theory are
born of the spirit of idealism). Yet, before we arrive at a premature judgment and
accuse Lyotard's conception of an "agonal discourse" of wanting to palm off on
us the Social Darwinism of an early capitalist society of competition as post-
modern thinking, we want especially to emphasize one point: Lyotard says that
a structure conceived to be uniform (be it as system, as universal consensus, or
as classless society) would have to renounce completely the idea of innovation.
As soon as the balanced state of forces was achieved, nothing could ever change
again. Above all, it would be difficult to explain what a saturated structure should
change in itself in the first place, and how it would go about it if all its elements
are merely parts of a whole. Parts of a whole always execute only the movements
prescribed by the laws of the whole. Only a part of the sort that, for itself, had
a certain autonomy, i.e., could not be reached from the concept of the whole by
an ordered sequence of deductive steps, could rise up against the whole. These
conditions, according to Lyotard, are only guaranteed in his idea of a "paralogy"
of the individual language games liberated from the systematic reference to the
whole language games that in the realm of the philosophy of language sought
to imitate a form of organization known to us, for example, in classical anarchism
or anarcho-syndicalism. Lyotard's imagined enemy is "the system" and "totality"
in all their manifestations, above all in the form of bureaucraticized institutions
that paralyze the will to innovation, indeed, to "displacement" and "disorienta-
tion," whether in the form of bureaucratic capitalism or of actually existing social-
ism. Even consensus that is free from domination, as long as it is not kept alive
by the freedom to infinite discussion, does not escape his suspicion that it, in real-
ity, is a bureaucratic instrument for avoiding discussion or bringing it to a stand-
still; only that revolution would truly be nontotalitarian that would be permanent.
(From here, I believe, one can in part explain the attraction that not only Nietz-
scheanism, but also Maoism a strange constellation had for the neostruc-
turalist intellectuals.)
In all texts of neostructuralism, by the way, we encounter a certain skepticism
toward the feasibility of absolute consensus. This occurs most powerfully in the
work of Jacques Lacan, who suspects discursive agreement of being a narcis-
84 LECTURE 5
sisme deux. Every consensus and we have to understand the term in the broad
sense in which it also designates customs, traditional forms of life, phrases held
to be true or binding establishes agreement on a system of exclusions on the part
of those who concur in it: the binding force of the binding, or the truth of the cor-
rect, excludes the unallowable and the incorrect, just as in scientific discourse the
language game of the pertinent statement excludes all other language games (for
example, the narrative, the religious, the prescriptive, the promissory language
game, etc., PC, 25ff.). Lyotard recognizes the university of Humboldt and
Schleiermacher as an attempt to transfer the concept of universality onto the inter-
disciplinary dialogue among departments, which itself is philosophy (PC, 3 Iff.).
This conception of a university was viewed as nonexclusionary (as opposed to the
exact sciences in the narrower sense), for it sought to ground the individual dis-
ciplines and discursive forms either by means of the idea of philosophical specula-
tion, or through the idea of the universal, principally unlimited hermeneutical dia-
logue. If this last attempt dialectically to unify scientifically and narratively
mediated legitimation failed, there were at least two reasons for this failure. The
first was brought to light by Nietzsche: the loss of meaning of scientific thinking
developed as a consequence of the application of the scientific claim to truth to
this claim itself ("he shows that 'European nihilism
1
resulted from the truth re-
quirement of science being turned back against itself; PC, 39). As soon as the
scientific attitude turns the imperative of scientific legitimation, with the same
rigor as against everything nonscientific, against its own principles, science col-
lapses into the ungrounded. "The speculative hierarchy of learning gives way to
an immanent and, as it were, 'flat' network of areas of inquiry, the respective
frontiers of which are in constant flux. The old 'faculties' splinter into institutes
and foundations of all kinds, and the universities lose their function of speculative
legitimation" (PC, 39). A second reason for the delegitimation of the scientific
attitude is the impossibility of a universal metadiscourse. Doubts about its exis-
tence connect romantic hermeneutics with the work of Wittgenstein, Gadamer,
and the neostructuralists. This is not the place to ground this doubt philosophi-
cally: Schleiermacher, Wittgenstein, and Derrida all do it in quite different ways.
I limit our discussion to the consequences Lyotard derives from it. Science, he
says, has ceased to be capable of legitimating, as the last metalanguage, all other
forms of knowledge and action (as speculative discourse had believed it could
do). Prescriptive discourse, for example, or the discourse of desire escape it. In-
stead of one language of science, there appear many irreducible language games.
The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of lan-
guage games. The social bond is linguistic, but is not woven with a sin-
gle thread. It is a fabric formed by the intersection of at least two (and
in reality an indeterminate number of) language games obeying different
rules. . . .
LECTURE 5 D 85
We may form a pessimistic impression of this splintering: nobody
speaks all of those languages, they have no universal metalanguage, the
project of the system-subject is a failure, the goal of emancipation has
nothing to do with science, we are all stuck in the positivism of this or
that discipline of learning, the learned scholars have turned into scien-
tists, the diminished tasks of research have become compartmentalized
and no one can master them all. Speculative or humanistic philosophy
is forced to relinquish its legitimation duties, which explains why phi-
losophy is facing a crisis wherever it persists in arrogating such func-
tions and is reduced to the study of systems of logic or the history of
ideas where it has been realistic enough to surrender them. (PC, 66,
113)
This pessimism, however, is not the only possible reaction to the "crisis of mean-
ing" that occurred with the delegitimation of the claim for universality. Lyotard
finds positive aspects in it. According to him, the loss of universality emancipates
the variety of the knowable and sayable. This, of course, presupposes that the
meaning of the word "knowledge" changes (PC, 60). From now on, it should no
longer serve to designate a system of exclusions that can anticipatingly control
its results on the basis of secure premises, as classical structuralism still imagined
possible. This newly understood "knowledge" "is producing not the known, but
the unknown. And it suggests a model of legitimation that has nothing to do with
maximized performance, but has as its basis difference understood as paralogy"
(PC, 60). In short, in the face of the absence of a universally valid metalanguage,
be that Luhmann's system or Habermas's consensus, one has to get acquainted
with a "model of an 'open system' " (PC, 64) whose principal instability gives dis-
sent much greater chances than consensus. Dissent, moreover, is innovative; con-
sensus leans toward conservatism, for it brings antagonistic arguments to a stand-
still and reduces difference to identity. In its extreme it is even terroristic, "as is
the behavior of the system described by Luhmann. By terror I mean the efficiency
gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language
game one shares with him. . . . It [terror] says:'Adapt your aspirations to our
endsor else' " (PC, 63-64). In another sense even the consensus theory of
Habermas's Diskurs is "terroristic": first, because it determines in advance the
universal-pragmatic rules on the basis of which one opens a conversation (they
cannot be debated); and second, because it prescribes consensus as the aim of our
entering into a conversation; consensus, however, can only be a state of our dis-
cussion, never its purpose and its end. If it were its purpose, each society would
be required to limit its conversations with a view toward its requirement for con-
sensus, which thus would assume terroristic traits, as confirmed by Sartre's pes-
simistic analysis of the transition from "fusing societies" to those held together
only by terror.
To be sure, the positive and alternative things Lyotard proposes are far from
Sb U LfcCl UKfc !>
being clear; and one can hardly make more sense of his visions of the future than
from the monthly changing manifestos of the political "alternatives," in whose in-
tellectual climate The Postmodern Condition belongs. The lack of concreteness
in terms of a feasible alternative does not, however, diminish, to my mind, the
right of an author to articulate his discontent with the axioms of the dominating
state of society. And in this articulation we find to be sure, in essay form
striking similarities with what we already know from Derrida: a fundamental sus-
picion of consensus formations of whatever kind (and their identification with the
concept of metaphysics); a preference for differentiation and for change of the
system (instead of the stabilization of systems as in structuralism or systems the-
ory);
10
a language-theoretically founded doubt in the claim for universality of the
(speculative) intellect, even when it appears in the much more moderate form of
a universal hermeneutics; a certain return to the vitalism of desire in resistance
to the demands of the superego, which is allied with the system. Both have further
in common the inability to formulate truly feasible alternatives, but we do not
want to criticize even that too rashly, for ignorance about how our future is to
be formed after the decline of traditional practices is our common condition, even
if, with good reason, one refrains from retrogressing to Nietzsche, hastily charac-
terizing our status quo as "postmodern." It could indeed be that the essence of
modern times (of the Temps Modernes) is not correctly thought out in the pro-
grams of neostructuralism and that we have to submit "deconstruction" to a re-
vision.
Lecture 6
Jean-Franois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition not only serves as additional
evidence for our working hypothesis, according to which neostructuralism is
thinking that jettisons metaphysic's demand for system and domination. This
book also develops a thesis about the historical coming-into-Being of the "post-
modern situation." As we recall, Lyotard explains the necessity of thinking in
"open systems" without internal unity on the basis of the disintegration of the pos-
sibility of maintaining a universal metalanguage. This possibility presupposes
that the individual language games through which we perspectively live our
Being-in-the-world can be gone beyond by some sort of speech that itself is not
relative. Such nonrelative speech, for its part, presupposes an authority that mod-
ern metaphysics conceives as "the Absolute." If it can be demonstrated-and Der-
rida has shown this more clearly than Lyotard-that the thought of the Absolute
itself cannot escape the "structurality of structure," then one can no longer lay
claim to a transhistorical frame of orientation beyond linguistic differentiality.
Systems without internal unity and without absolute center become the inescapa-
ble condition of our Dasein and our orientation in the world.
This, in essence, is the fundamental insight of all post-Hegelian philosophy
from Schelling, Kierkegaard, and Marx, through Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre,
and Gadamer. One could speak of it as a philosophy of finitude. The minimal ac-
cord of all these approaches, which shape and have shaped the face of our present,
is the standpoint that it is not possible to interpret our world from an Archimedean
point, from an "infinite consciousness," as Gadamer says. Modern consciousness,
after all, is not therefore finite because it is unfree and limited in its possibilities,
88 LECTURE 6
but rather in the exact sense that it is not the ground of itself, i.e., of its own sub-
sistence.
Heidegger called this not-Being-the-basis-for-itself "thrownness," and he
made clear that the inescapable dependence of Dasein presents no limit to its free-
dom. "As being, Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has been brought
into its 'there,
1
but not of its own accord" (BT, 329). That simply means that "as
existent, it never comes back behind its thrownness"; however, it does not mean
that it is not the basis for the possibilities through which it relates to its thrownness
and to its future:
The Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get
that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-
basis. To be its own thrown basis is that potentiality-for-Being which is
the issue for care. (BT, 330)
In other words, if the subject of Dasein is not the author of its factual subsistence,
then this not-Being-a-basis "does not signify anything like not-Being-present-at-
hand or not-subsisting; what one has in view here is rather a 'not' which is consti-
tutive for this Being of Dasein-its thrownness. The character of this 'not' as a
'not' may be defined existentially" (BT, 330): namely, as a having a potentiality
for Being. This having a potentiality for Being "belongs to Daseirfs Being-free
for its existential possibilities" (BT, 331). Because it is not the basis for its own
Being, it i s-by virtue of its essential nullity-nonetheless precisely the basis of
its not-Being, i.e., of the modifications it allows to occur to Being. (Sartre's point
of departure in Being and Nothingness is founded in precisely this reflection.)
This not Being the basis for itself can be interpreted differently: in Marx's
terms as dependence of consciousness on its (social) Being; in Darwin's and
Nietzsche's terms as descendance of our consciousness from the phenomenon of
the will to life; in terms of the historicists as the insurmountability of history; in
Freud's terms as consciousness's not being master in its own home (i.e., as its in-
capability of ever completely making present the unconscious portion); or in
Heidegger's and Gadamer's terms as an overhang of Being over every possible
interpretation we make of it. "To exist historically," Gadamer says very con-
cretely, "means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete."
1
That implies
that consciousness that understands meaning can never dissociate itself com-
pletely from "what is historically pre-given" (TM, 269) and can never enlighten
itself about its Being. "In the last analysis," Gadamer adds, "// understanding is
self-understanding, but not in the sense of a preliminary self-possession or of one
finally and definitely achieved. . . . The self that we are does not possess itself;
one could say that it 'happens.' "
2
I do not (yet) want to investigate the epistemological problematics of such for-
mulations here; rather, I want to call your attention to a presupposition neostruc-
turalism shares with post-Hegelian philosophy in its entirety, and this is some-
LECTURE 6 89
thing which, for the most part, it shares consciously, as the frequent references
to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger demonstrate. This prerequisite can be
summarized most briefly as follows: that consciousness-or, and this is the same
thing, that understanding through which we observe the world is not, once
again, a work of our consciousness or understanding, but rather something that
happens or occurs to us. There is consciousness, but consciousness is no origi-
nary phenomenon, it is no principle (as it still was for Kant and Fichte, and, in
a certain sense, for Husserl and Sartre). If our view of the world were a product
of our consciousness, then we would be able to explain our condition completely
by means of our consciousness. Nothing would be obscure, everything would be
masterable, the world would lie before our eyes as an open book we ourselves
had written. "In fact," says Gadamer, "history does not belong to us, but we be-
long to it" (TM, 245); and further: "Understanding is not to be thought of so much
as an action of one's subjectivity, but as the placing of oneself within a process
of tradition, in which past and present are constantly fused" (258). As those
thrown into history, we always "arrive, as it were, too late if we want to know
what we ought to believe" (446); if we, that is, want to bring before us the sig-
nificance of our speech that is independent of our historicity (i.e., "objective") by
means of a reflection that itself is historical-linguistic. The historical tradition of
our system of communication is our inescapable condition; our understanding is
always already an implanted understanding; the reflection through which we
strive to gain absolute clarity about our situation always protrudes with one of
its poles into the unprescribable, into that which is never totally dissolvable in
knowledge.
I have intentionally heaped this long list of metaphors, all of which pursue one
intention, in order to illustrate the derivativeness of reflection vis--vis Being or,
for that matter, tradition. These metaphors turn up in the history of philosophy
as soon as German idealism as the last great climax of metaphysical interpreta-
tion of Being as Being-at-one's-disposal, i.e., as graspable presence-enters into
the phase of self-critique. Here are two examples of this: the first is Fichte's ^in-
terpretation of absolute self-consciousness as a "power into which an eye is im-
planted."
3
In this formulation the eye of reflection, to which the originality of self-
knowledge portrays itself, is given a secondary position, the primary one belong-
ing to force. Indeed, Fichte spoke of a "feeling of dependence and conditional-
ity";
4
this formula does not question the originality of consciousness and of free-
dom, but it does admit that both of these, precisely because of their originality,
cannot be brought back once again to a ground, and in this sense they indeed are
groundless and ungroundable. The second example I want to present to you picks
up directly at this point: Friedrich Schleiermacher introduced the expression
"feeling of absolute dependence" into the debate about the originality of con-
sciousness; with this he sought to express that the supreme consciousness of
which the human being is capable cannot provide once more for itself, but rather
90 LECTURE 6
remains inaccessible in its very Being. Schleiermacher distinguishes these
two forms of causation-in the discourse of philosophical terminology as real
ground and knowledge ground (ratio essendi/ratio cognoscendi). The real ground
founds the Dasein of a state of affairs; the knowledge ground founds its knowabil-
ity. Applied to absolute consciousness this means that the self is the basis of its
own self-knowledge, but not the basis of its own Being (and not even of the Being
of its self-knowledge). Schleiermacher also distinguishes between both of these
grounds when he claims that the innerliness of self-consciousness "simply takes
place in the subject," but is not "effected by the subject."
5
From its first appearance
in section 3 of Schleiermacher's Christian Faith onward, the concept of "feeling"
carries the additional meaning of "determinateness." What is so distinguishing
about feeling (in which knowledge has its origin) is "that we are conscious of our
selves as absolutely dependent."
6
One can also express it in this way: the principle
and last securing ground of all recent philosophy, the evidence of our immediate
self-experience, is itself "somehow determined, but it is irrelevant exactly how."
"This transcendent determinateness of self-consciousness is the religious aspect
of the same, or the religious feeling, and in this the transcendental ground or the
highest being is itself represented."
7
I have presented the example from Schleiermacher in more detail because it
allows an interpretation that is interesting for us. Namely, it allows us to translate
the inaccessible determinateness of self-consciousness as tre signifi. That
would mean and you certainly remember what we described as the paradox of
Fichte's Science of Knowledge a few lectures ago that self-consciousness itself
carries the trace of a "transcendent determinateness" (in the sense of "signification
d'origine transcendante"), by virtue of which it is marked in its Being in the first
place, as well as distinguished from other beings. Derrida called this act of
differentiation or articulation, as we know, diffrance. And we also know he is
of the opinion that self-consciousness does not escape, to the extent that it is deter-
mined, the law of the "structurality of structure." In other words, insofar as self-
consciousness grasps itself as that which it is, it is already marked by the trace
of a tardiness vis--vis that by which it feels itself shaped, i.e., upon which it is
dependent on the basis of its absolute determinateness. As soon as it opens its
eyes it is robbed of its presence.
Thus here the experience of the groundlessness or secondariness of self-
consciousnessfrom which follow both the historicity of Dasein and the ines-
capability of structure found its first significant expression.
8
We only need to
show that even neostructuralism refers back to this experience. I want to give you
a few especially characteristic examples of this from the work of Michel Foucault
and of Louis Althusser. They all basically vary Fichte's formula of the implanted
gaze or the implanted eye, a formula, thus, that wants to express figuratively that
the gaze through which we make our world accessible was not created by us, but
rather implanted into us; we were to play with the metaphor in-oculated. As
LECTURE 6 D 91
soon as we see something as something, we are already in a (Heideggerian) clear-
ing of Being that unfolds itself m us but not through us, and with a view to which
we experience ourselves as dependent.
For Foucault it is a certain order of discourse that implants into us the gaze
for our world.
The field of relations that characterizes a discursive formation is the lo-
cus in which symbolizations and effects may be perceived, situated, and
determined.
9
Everything that in classical philosophy was taken to be an activity of the
subjectits ability to perceive objects, to ascertain their relation to each other and
thereby to determine them is seen by Foucault as a secondary effect of what he
calls the discursive formation of an age. Before I explain this expression I want
to give a few more quotations that have the same thrust.
This group of elements, formed in a regular manner by a discursive
practice, and which are indispensable to the constitution of a science,
although they are not necessarily destined to give rise to one, can be
called knowledge. Knowledge is that of which one can speak in a dis-
cursive practice, and which is specified by that fact: the domain con-
stituted by the different objects that will or will not acquire a scientific
status (the knowledge of psychiatry in the nineteenth century is not the
sum of what was thought to be true, but the whole set of practices, sin-
gularities, and deviations of which one could speak in psychiatric dis-
course); knowledge is also the space in which the subject may take up a
position and speak of the objects with which he deals in his dis-
course; . . . archaeology finds the point of balance of its analysis in
savoirthat is, in a domain in which the subject is necessarily situated
and dependent, and can never figure as titular (either as a transcenden-
tal activity, or as empirical consciousness). (AK, 182-83)
I will add two quotations from the introduction to Louis Althusser and Etienne
Balibar's Reading Capital, in order to expand our list of examples.
Any object or problem situated on the terrain and within the horizon,
i.e., in the definite structured field of the theoretical problematic of a
given theoretical discipline, is visible. We must take these words liter-
ally. The sighting is thus no longer the act of an individual subject, en-
dowed with the faculty of "vision" which he exercises either attentively
or distractedly; the sighting is the act of its structural conditions, it is
the relation of immanent reflection between the field of the problematic
and its objects and its problems. Vision then loses the religious
privileges of divine reading: it is no more than a reflection of the imma-
nent necessity that ties an object or problem to its conditions of exis-
tence, which lie in the conditions of its production. It is literally no
92 D LECTURE 6
longer the eye (the mind's eye) of a subject which sees what exists in
the field defined by a theoretical problematic: it is this field itself which
sees itself in the objects or problems it defines-sighting being merely
the necessary reflection of the field on its objects. (This no doubt ex-
plains a "substitution" in the classical philosophies of vision, which are
very embarrassed by having to say both that the light of vision comes
from the eye, and that it comes from the object.)
1
If the structural conditions that implant the eye into the theory change, then even
such a "change of terrain" cannot be explained as the effect of an innovative action
on the part of the subject (or subjects).
Here I take this transformation for a fact, without any claim to analyse
the mechanism that unleashed it and completed it. The fact that this
"change of terrain" which produces as its effect this metamorphosis in
the gaze, was itself only produced in very specific, complex and often
dramatic conditions; that it is absolutely irreducible to the idealist myth
of a mental decision to change "view-points"; that it brings into play a
whole process that the subject's sighting, far from producing, merely
reflects in its own place; that in this process of real transformation of
the means of production of knowledge, the claims of a "constitutive
subject" are as vain as are the claims of the subject of vision in the
production of the visible; that the whole process takes place in the di-
alectical crisis of the mutation of a theoretical structure in which the
"subject" plays, not the part it believes it is playing, but the part which
is assigned to it by the mechanism of the process all these are ques-
tions that cannot be studied here. (RC, 27)
Let's summarize the decisive common points of these four passages. The first
states that the field of relations that constructs a "discursive formation" is what
initially allows the subject introduced into this field to interact symbolically, to
perceive objects, to relate them to other objects, to differentiate them from other
objects: in short, to determine and differentiate its world. The second quotation
applies this fundamental thesis to a particular case of knowledge (savoir) in which
it underscores that neither subjective certainty nor possible truth elevates a state-
ment to the status of a knowledge (in Foucault's sense), but rather that "to know"
means to be inscribed in a field of symbolic practices (pratiques) whose rules re-
produce the knowledge. The subject that supposedly performs these practices
sovereignly and critically projects their meaning, proves itself to be "necessarily
situated and dependent," without ever being able to appear as proprietor or pri-
mary authority of the discursive field. If the subject has consciousness of itself,
it will mainly be the consciousness of its own utter dependence.
In both passages from Althusser and Balibar we come across variations of the
metaphor of the implanted eye that we first found in Fichte. The first passage ad-
dresses the being-implanted of the gazethus of the theoretical attitude to the
LECTURE 6 D 93
world; the second addresses the being-implanted of praxis as well, which ex-
changes one structural formation for another.
In the first passage it is stated that the gaze through which a state of the world
presents itself to us as a meaningful context of involvements is forestructured.
"Forestructured" is to be understood quite literally: the significations and con-
cepts we invest in a particular theoretical worldview are not expressions of our
intentions, i.e., not the externalization of our prearticulated {vorausdriicklich) in-
terior, as Husserl calls it; rather the signs, through whose application we theoreti-
cally survey (articulate) reality, are put at our disposal by structure. As soon as
we use them, our assertion that we are the ones who established them comes too
late. The gaze that is permitted to us by a certain context of signs pregiven by
the discursive entirety of an age is always a gaze implanted into us it is inocu-
lated into us "literally."
11
How exactly does one explain the phenomenon of con-
sciousness and self-consciousness, for which, undoubtedly, an immediate access
to itself is indispensable, if one, in addition, simultaneously maintains that con-
sciousness is an effect that appears in and through the differential play of the
marks of a structure? Before formulating objections one must first, in fact, know
precisely the thesis at which they are directed and understand well its motivations.
As you see, I am concentrating on presenting to you the main features of neostruc-
turalism; and this presupposes that I attempt first of all to understand as well as
possible the causes that have led to its formulation. And in my opinion what Fou-
cault and Althusser give us to consider can certainly be understood.
We saw that the fundamental insight of structuralism (which is perhaps identi-
cal with the fundamental insight of postclassical philosophy in its entirety, insofar
as it participates in the linguistic turn) is that in the world there are no thoughts
in themselves, and that thoughts require for their distinction the structuring of the
material of expression. Most of you were certainly convinced by this thesis and
by the way Saussure justified it. Now we do not want to abandon it too quickly
just because of a few oddities that arise when one considers its consequences. For
the consciousness that I have of my psychic and mental acts or states is yet doubt-
less in every case a thought. If that is the case, it must distinguish itself from other
thoughts in order to determine itself; i.e., it must articulate itself. But to articulate
itself means to inscribe itself in a structural texture through whose "play of differ-
ence" it can first become that thought as which weapparently immediately-
grasp it. Now Foucault and Althusser say precisely this about the genesis of our
self-consciousness.
On the other hand, we have been warned in advance: Derrida and Lyotard
have given reasons that cause us to doubt that structures are ever "whole," i.e.,
closed in themselves. If the play of differences has to be conceived as infinitely
open, the thought of our self must also be alterable and without final identity. We
might like to spontaneously protest against the imputation that lies in this conse-
quence. In philosophy, however, protestations must be fundamentally better
94 LECTURE 6
grounded than the position against which they are directed. And as long as we
are not capable of rejecting or limiting the notion that there is no thought where
there is no sign (and thus no structure), we should not repress our doubts, but
rather think them through thoroughly. One thing can be ascertained: even if struc-
tures are conceived as open, this does not disqualify the structuralist principle that
meaning and significance (and therefore thoughts) are only formed interstructur-
ally, and that, since even I-ness (Ichheit) is a thought, this is likewise valid for
the self.
Althusser, by the way, whose revolutionary Marxism would otherwise remain
unfounded, explicitly takes into account the fact of the alteration of structure. We
find it in the last of the quotations I cited: the transformation of structures is the
result of very complex conditions; we would like to know something more
definite about this, but at any rate, it seems to be a fact that subjectivity that is
practical and projects meaning plays no role in the alteration of structure. And
this is exactly what we wanted to know. Althusser says in strangely hypnotizing
formulations that there is no such thing as a "constitutive subject," not even in the
practical field; but even the practices of subjects are not the causes but rather the
effect of structural processes that must be conceived as changes in relations of
production (relations of production are, however, as the phrase itself implies,
structured). Thus Althusser arrives at the conclusion that structure both implants
the gaze into the subject, and also prescribes its practices.
But precisely how, one might ask, does this occur? Especially the Saussure of
the Edition critique had always admitted that articulation of the material of ex-
pression is only one side of the process of meaning formation, the other side of
which consists in interpretation. In other words, Saussure thought that articula-
tion is indeed a necessary condition for the distinction of thoughts, but not a
sufficient condition, just as a cause without which something else does not occur
is far from having to be that cause through which the effect is positively triggered.
For example, no one will doubt that the suspension or reduction of philosophy
classes at some Paris universities and high schools necessarily presupposes a
world-economical crisis, without already wanting to imply that the recession is
positively responsible for the measures of Giscardist educational policy in Paris.
The same could be true of the relationship of articulation and interpretation: it
could be true and here we have to agree completely with structuralism that
there is no meaning where no play of differences governs; and it could further
be true that the play of differences, when left to itself, does not positively found
meaning. The examination of this will be a main task of coming lectures, espe-
cially those that address details of the neostructuralist theory of the subject and
of meaning. At this point I only want to mention, with Foucault and Althusser
in mind, that Saussure himself, in fact, believed that the (speaker's) consciousness
creates the units in the flow of the spoken mass (masse parle): "Thought is what
LECTURE 6 G 95
defines the units: there is always a relationship with thought."
12
Another passage
reads:
The langue can be considered as something that, from one moment to
the next, interprets the generation that it receives; langue is an instru-
ment that one tries to understand. The present collectivity does not at
all interpret it like the preceding generations, for the conditions have
changed, and the means for understanding it are no longer the same.
Thus there has to be the first act of interpretation, which is ac-
tive. . . . This interpretation will be revealed by distinguishing the
units (which is what all langue activity leads to).
13
Therefore, while there is no distinctness without differentiation of the "spoken
mass," this differentiation occurs for its part, however, in light of an interpreta-
tion of which Saussure claims no less than that it is what posits the distinctions
of the units (i.e., determines them and, on the basis of a new interpretation, dis-
solves them again).
This is not the place to investigate how this interpreting activity appears from
close up. Foucault and Althusser are, at any rate, not aware of it and are driven
for this reason to a characteristic formulation: it is not the eye of a subject (or
of the idealistic spirit) that makes visible the context of involvements of a sym-
bolic order; rather the eye of the subject is seen, for its part, by the structural
field. In other words, the consciousness that begins in and with each use of signs
is not the effect of a projection of meaning, but rather a process of self-reflection
of this field. (With this Althusser finds himself in argumentative proximity to
Marx, who also criticized idealistic philosophy for calling the subject, in an
unusual quid pro quo, what "in reality" is only a predicate [namely, the self-
consciousness of subjects], while it views the authentic subject of the historical
process [the social reality in flesh and blood] as a mere predicate of the absolute
spirit.) In this way not only the theory of a society is a reflex generated by struc-
tures, but even the praxis of subjects is nothing more than a reflection of the sub-
jects on the latitude of their actions assigned to them by the structure. Here you
must recall the terminology of Marx and Engels, who liked to translate reflection
as mirroring (Widerspiegelung) (of pregiven infrastructures).
Before we examine the dethroning of the self-consciously acting subject in the
theory of Foucault and Althusser for its practical consequences, and, in addition,
for its concrete execution, I want to make four remarks about the argument itself.
The fact that these remarks to a certain extent have a critical accent does not mean
that I take the argument with Foucault and Althusser (and other authors of neo-
structuralism) to be complete and capable of a final judgment. On the contrary,
I would like to mention a few motifs that also recur in other texts of neostructural-
ism, and for which we want to be prepared. First of all, I find in the formulation
96 LECTURE 6
"We are not the ones who see the discursive field, but much rather the field that
sees us," a circle characteristic of all similar formulations. It appears in more in-
tensive form when it is maintained that "the sighting . . . is the relation of im-
manent reflection between the field of the problematic and its objects and its prob-
lems" (RC, 25). This immanent reflection of the field onto itself (and its elements)
is not only equivalent to what Hegel calls "intro-Reflection" (and thus to a figure
from classical philosophy of the subject); it also misses its critical intention in an-
other way. This intention, after all, was to allow the supposedly autarchic subject
to step down as the author of structure. However, what was achieved by the for-
mulation just given was that what, up to this point, was considered the achieve-
ment of the "constitutive subject," now has to be attributed to structure itself,
namely, the capacity for self-reflection and practical change. Both capacities are
now given over to structure (or to the field, or to the discursive formation), with-
out, at the same time, having brought a fundamental objection against the theorem
of praxis and of self-reflection. Thus Althusser's objection to idealism, that, quid
pro quo, the constitutive subject takes over the position of structure, turns against
Althusser himself. Subjectivity, which was repressed in the position of the
individual, returns as subjectivity of the reflecting and actively transforming
structurereturn of the repressed.
Second, I discover certain parallels to neutral monism's theory of conscious-
ness in the explanation of the phenomenon of "consciousness" as we were in-
troduced to it in rudimentary form through the passages from Foucault and
Althusser. Neutral monism is a position represented by William James, Ernst
Mach, and, for some time, Bertrand Russell. As the name suggests, it remains
neutral concerning the alternative of an idealist or a materialist explanation of the
phenomenon of consciousness. To put it briefly, this position maintains that con-
sciousness is a feature of relations between elements, not, however, between an
I and an object. We will come across this position again when we criticize in more
detail the neostructuralist theory of the subject. At this point, we will only men-
tion that the idea of an "implanted gaze" is, to a large extent, similar to that of
neutral monism, for the gaze is indeed no longer constituted by a meaning-
projecting practical subject, but rather appears as a secondary effect of relations
within the structural (or discursive) field.
Among the thinkers of neostructuralism, Lacan has found the strongest formu-
lations for this. He speaks of the subject as an effect of language, or, to be more
precise, as an "effect of the signifier."
14
According to Lacan, even the passive
grammatical form through which we express the significance of a signsignifi,
signified is an indication of this. The supposedly prior self-possession of mean-
ing must hand over its authority to the action of the signifier that prescribes the
effects, "in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming
through that passion the signified" (, 284).
Of course, this is an abbreviated expression: one signifier can for itself alone
LECTURE 6 D 97
effect nothing at all. This makes clear Lacan's definition of the signifier, which
at first glance seems obscure.
My definition of a signifier (there is no other) is as follows: a signifier
is that which represents the subject for another signifier. This signifier
will therefore be the signifier for which all the other signifiers represent
the subject: that is to say, in the absence of this signifier, all the other
signifiers represent nothing, since nothing is represented only for some-
thing else. (, 316)
I would summarize the quintessence of this "definition" as follows: the subject (or
the meaning in which it resides) is what occurs in the play of references between
at least two signifiers, just as for Saussure the value of a sign occurs in the play
of at least two "verbal images.'
1
I conclude that this interpretation correctly
represents Lacan's opinion because the only parallel formulation that I found in
his crits corroborates it: "The subject . . . is produced by the appeal made in
the Other [this is Lacan's standard phrase for Freud's unconscious] to the second
signifier" (E [Fr. d.], 835). I understand him to say that subjectivity is explained
here as a (negative) effect of differential relations between elements of the struc-
ture: negative, because this effect only occurs if the subject renounces its positiv-
ity and thereby is subsumed thoroughly by the negative "play of differences."
(This explains its relative "nullity," its mode of Being a "nothingness of Being,"
which was already recognized by idealism.)
My third remark addresses certain parallels between formulations by Foucault
or Althusser, on the one hand, and similar ones by Gadamer, on the other hand,
concerning the passivity of the subject. I do not want to look at them individually,
rather I will only indicate what kind of language usage I am thinking of: Gadamer
likes to say that it is less true that the subject speaks language, than that it is what
is spoken by language (TM, 421). Likewise we "fall into" a conversation, rather
than "conduct" it (TM, 345). The coming-into-language of the truth of a discourse
shows itself as "something that the thing itself does, and which thought 'suffers.
1
This activity of the thing itself is the real speculative moment that takes hold of
the speaker" (TM, 431). "Thus here it really is true to say that this event is not
our action upon the thing, but the act of the thing itself (TM, 421). This chain
of metaphorical expressions always has the same intention: to deny the idea that
the subject chooses its interpretation of the world sovereignly and by virtue of
its own autarchy; on the contrary, it in fact arrives at its self-understanding con-
versely by virtue of standing in a traditionand this view connects Gadamer's
hermeneutics with Foucault's archaeology. It makes no difference in this context
whether I say "tradition" (like Gadamer), "discourse" (like Foucault), or "struc-
tural field" (like Althusser): it is enough to understand that even traditions, insofar
as processes of communication are stored in them, as is also the case for what
98 G LECTURE 6
Foucault calls "archive," obey rules, for every symbolic interaction is guided by
rules.
Fourth and finally, I want to recall a common source of hermeneutic and of
neostructuralist expression in the metaphor of the implanted gaze-a source that
is cited neither by Foucault nor by Althusser (although it is by Derrida and La-
can): I am referring to Heidegger's metaphor about the clearing of Being. This
metaphor seeks to express that the frame of interpretation within which we live
our relations to the world and to other subjects is not the work of our sovereignty,
but rather is something sent by Being that shows itself (or lets us see it) precisely
under this particular interpretation. Heidegger also speaks of "disclosure." The
"world" in which we exist and through which we understand ourselves precedes
our self-understanding and our self-consciousness: only with the aid of signs,
which an already constituted context of references puts at our disposal, can we
attain a consciousness of our world, of our situation, and of our self (BT, sections
17 and 18). You see that even Heidegger had already denied the subject a prior
subsisting self-consciousness: for him the subject is tendered (verussert) to its
world completely ecstatically, and it gains knowledge of itself only out of the
reflection that "relucently" falls back on it from the objects of the world. Under-
standing, Heidegger says, is Dasein's (this is his name for the subject) most
authentic possibility of transgressing Being in the direction of its meaning, in or-
der to let be announced "relucently" to itself from Dasein what it itself is (BT,
42).
15
The model of consciousness that underlies this formulation by Heidegger
is similar to that of neostructuralism in a decisive point: both assume that con-
sciousness has no prior access to itself, but rather that it learns what is the case
with itself from the "order of things," from that which Heidegger calls its "world."
The kind of Being which belongs to Dasein is rather such that, in un-
derstanding its own Being, it has a tendency to do so in terms of that
entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which
is essentially constant in terms of the "world." In Dasein itself, and
therefore in its own understanding of Being, the way the world is un-
derstood is, as we shall show, reflected back ontologically upon the
way in which Dasein itself gets interpreted. (36-37)
Now we could assume that what Heidegger calls "world" is semiologically
scarcely articulated. The structuralists take issue with the possibility of a self-
reflection prior to the "world" with the argument that there is no meaning where
expression fails. But Heidegger, without, however, referring to Saussure, comes
very close to this conclusion. In the chapters of Being and Time dedicated to the
"idea of the worldhood of the world," there are sections entitled "Reference and
Signs" (section 17) and "Involvement and Significance: The Worldhood of the
World" (section 18). Here Heidegger demonstrates very exactly that the under-
standability of the "world" is an effect of its disclosure by means of "signs"; or,
LECTURE 6 D 99
said differently, of its articulating taking into possession through a being that ap-
proaches it practically. Its referentiality to other signs is essential to the sign: the
quantity of signs becomes a world-the frame of a structure that orients me-only
if all are connected to one another. The totality of such a context of references
Heidegger also likes to call a "totality of involvements" (un tout finalis, as the
French translators write). In such a "totality of involvements" (116), the totality
is always prior to the individual parts: it is, as Heidegger expresses it, the condi-
tion of possibility for the fact that a single being is familiar to me under the point
of view of its applicability. For I know the "world" in which this "equipment" is
involved, i.e., in which this object of use or this sign functions.
But what does it mean to say that that for which entities within-the-
world are proximally freed must have been previously disclosed? To
Dasein's Being, an understanding [emphasis added] of Being belongs.
Any understanding [Verstndnis] has its Being in an act of understand-
ing [Versteheri\. If Being-in-the-world is a kind of Being which is es-
sentially befitting to Dasein, then to understand Being-in-the-world be-
longs to the essential content of its understanding of Being. The
previous disclosure of that for which what we encounter within-the-
world is subsequently freed, amounts to nothing else than understanding
the world that world towards which Dasein as an entity always com-
ports itself. . . .
In the act of understanding [Verstehen], which we shall analyse more
thoroughly later (compare Section 31), the relations indicated above
must have been previously disclosed; the act of understanding holds
them in this disclosedness. It holds itself in them with familiarity; and
in so doing, it holds them before itself, for it is in these that its assign-
ment operates. The understanding lets itself make assignments both in
these relationships themselves and of them. The relational character
which these relationships of assigning possess, we take as one of sig-
nifying- Dasein, in its familiarity with significance, is the ontical
condition for the possibility of discovering entities which are encoun-
tered in a world with involvement {readiness-to-hand) as their kind of
Being, and which can thus make themselves known as they are in them-
selves [in seinem Ansich], . . .
But in significance itself, with which Dasein is always familiar, there
lurks the ontological condition which makes it possible for Dasein, as
something which understands and interprets, to disclose such things as
"signification"; upon these, in turn, is founded the Being of words and
of language. (BT, 118, 120-21)
We will see that Foucault strictly distinguishes his procedure from what
Heidegger calls "understanding" and Gadamer calls "hermeneutics." The essential
reason for this is that in French hermneutique and comprhension have different
connotations from those of their German equivalents. One difference, however,
100 U LECTURE 6
does not occur between Foucault and Heidegger, namely, that one made smio-
logie order of discourse the basis of his analyses, while the other sought to inter-
pret a semiologically unarticulated "world." Heidegger, as I have said, owes a
French-educated reader much with regard to the determination of the status of Be-
ing of the sign and of the symbolic order; but he does not owe the reader this:
that, for example, he did not understand the "context of involvements" as a struc-
tured totality. Earlier (Lecture 3) I cited the quotation that supports this assertion,
but I now repeat it in its context, preserved from a structuralist and formalizing
appropriation.
The context of assignments or references, which, as significance, is
constitutive for worldhood, can be taken formally in the sense of a sys-
tem of Relations. But one must note that in such formalizations the
phenomena get levelled off so much that their real phenomenal content
may be lost, especially in the case of such "simple" relationships as
those which lurk in significance. The phenomenal content of these "Re-
lations" and "Relata"the "in-order-to," the "for-the-sake-of," and the
"with-which" of an involvementis such that they resist any sort of
mathematical functionalization; nor are they merely something thought,
first posited in an "act of thinking." They are rather relationships in
which concernful circumspection as such already dwells. This "system
of Relations," as something constitutive for worldhood, is so far from
volatilizing the Being of the ready-to-hand within-the-world, that the
worldhood of the world provides the basis on which such entities can
for the first time be discovered as they are "substantially" "in them-
selves." And only if entities within-the-world can be encountered at all,
it is possible, in the field of such entities, to make accessible what is
just present-at-hand and no more. By reason of their Being-just-present-
at-hand-and-no-more, these latter entities can have their "properties"
defined mathematically in "functional concepts." Ontologically, such
concepts are possible only in relation to entities whose Being has the
character of pure substantiality. Functional concepts are never possible
except as formalized substantial concepts. (121-22)
One will see this diatribe against the procedures of formalization as unsophisti-
cated. They apparently are directed against Cassirer's Substance and Function in
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which appeared in 1910, and whose thematics
philosophers already discussed quite early on in connection with the statement
from the Cours that language is not a substance but a form, and which probably
influenced the terminology of the early Wittgenstein. Be that as it may, Heidegger
admits that "disclosure" can be conceived as a context of signs, and this, in turn,
can be conceived as a structure of the type of a system of relations. The expression
"system of relations" that Heidegger uses here (I assume, as already stated, that
he borrows it from Cassirer) is in no way terminologically neutral. Indeed, it is
LECTURE 6 D 101
generally assumed that with precisely this phrase one describes in a conceptually
correct manner what the structuralist conception of language understands under
a structure in general, and a linguistic structure in particularand which, in addi-
tion, Rudolf Carnap, for example, conceives of in a similar way in his The Logi-
cal Structure of the World, which appeared in 1928. The term "relational struc-
ture" can be developed most succinctly out of a differential comparison with the
concept of "algebraic structure." An algebraic structure is a triple function (E, R,
O), whereby E refers to the elements or set of individuals, R to a set of relations,
and O to a set of operations. "If a structure contains only operations and no rela-
tions, we are dealing with an algebra; if a structure contains only relations, i.e.,
if the set O is empty, then one speaks of a relational structure or of a relational
system, just as is the case with the system of a language."
16
When Heidegger admits this, on the one hand, for his concept of the context
of signs or references, and limits it, on the other hand, his caution seems to me
to have a simple reason. What he calls "mathematical formalization" could in the
worst case portray the inert reproduction of a prior interpretation (or dis-
closure/clearing) of the meaning of Being; and it is to this extent not "autono-
mous" or "purely formal," as presupposed by Hjelmslev's famous definition of lin-
guistic structure as an "autonomous entity of inner dependencies." Against this
type of formalization Heidegger insists on what he, perhaps clumsily, calls the
"substantial": namely, the ontic priority of a clearing of Being (i.e., of a world
disclosed to our praxis) before its ontological and, in an extended sense, scientific
theoretization and reduction to presence at hand.
We will see in what follows the extent to which this objection also pertains to
Foucault's analysis of discourse.
Lecture 7
In our previous lecture we described several figures of thought that recur in Fou-
cault's procedure of historiography called "archaeology." What first seemed strik-
ing to us was the metaphor of the "implanted eye" (or "gaze") in which we recog-
nized a figure of idealism's self-criticism at the turn to what the later Schelling
first called "existential philosophy." Then we mentioned some of the difficulties
that arise when one abandons the concept of a subject that sovereignly projects
its meaning, without renouncing the claim to an always possible self-reflection
(no longer of the subject, to be sure, but of structure). Finally, we recalled the
theoretical impulse that Foucaulfs thought received from Heidegger's idea of a
history of Being in the form of images of the world that indomitably prefigure
(vorgeben) all our thinking and understanding (I consider this impulse more signi-
ficant than that which Foucault received from Bachelard's and Canguilhem's
epistemology, although he refers more frequently to these predecessors than to
Heidegger). In this context we also mentioned that Heidegger himself described
the "world," from which subjects "relucently" allow their self-understanding to
be mediated to them, as a context of signs and even designated it with the speci-
fically structuralist term "system of relations." To be sure, we have not yet
gathered all the constitutive elements out of which Foucault constructs what he
calls the "order of discourse," but we already have the essential parts in our hands.
We want to examine these questions by means of a cursory reading of The Or-
der of Things. This book, one of the most debated works by this author, is subti-
tled Une Archologie des sciences humaines and appeared in 1966. For us it is
interesting not only for methodological reasons but also because of the content
109
LbLI UKf c, / U 1UJ
it presents in its four hundred or so pages: namely, the history of two epochal
ruptures-that which occurred at the transition from the Renaissance to the En-
lightenment (Foucault says: to the "classical age"); and that which took place dur-
ing romanticism (as the dislodging of "classical learning") and which still shapes
our present time. This history seeks, among other things, to explain how the "par-
adigm of representation" was overcome and how the human subject could have
assumed such a central place in the so-called historical sciences, as we know them
from the nineteenth century. This break with the representational model of cogni-
tion has something to do with the question that above all others motivates us,
namely, the question of whether we have to see the concept of the sign system
as open or as closed. In this regard we may expect quite a bit from a reading of
this text by Foucault, for this reading is the first that lets us see, and not only sys-
tematically think through, the decay of taxonomical thinking as something that
actually took place, as a historical process.
But first we are curious to know what kind of historiography we are dealing
with here. In the preface to the German translation of The Order of Things, Fou-
cault expressly refused the honor of being called a "structuralist."
1
And indeed,
I think we should heed his request. (I myself cautiously insert Foucault's works
into the frame of neostructuralism without overlooking that the authors I gather
here would also reject this title.) Foucault objected just as strenuously to being
viewed as a thinker in whose work the concepts of history (as a meaningful and
teleological movement) and of the transcendental subject play a role. And indeed,
his concept of discourse, which we want to approach step-by-step (since Foucault
himself nowhere introduces it in a plausible way), shares with the concept of syn-
chrony as it was developed by Saussure's editors the refusal to explain the mean-
ing of elements of a symbolical order in any other manner than from within the
totality of this order itself, i.e., specifically, not diachronically. The question, of
course, is how one can still pass as a historian after such a comprehensive prelimi-
nary decision of a theoretical order. Sartre was one of the first who asked Fou-
cault this question. He expressed his opinion about The Order of Things in an in-
terview that appeared under the title "Jean-Paul Sartre rpond."
What Foucault presents us with, as Kanters saw very well, is a geol-
ogy: the series of successive layers that make up our "ground." Each
one of these layers defines the conditions of possibility of a certain type
of thought which prevailed during a certain period. But Foucault tells
us neither what would be most interesting, namely how each thought is
constructed on the basis of these conditions, nor how men move from
one thought to another. In order to do this he would have to bring in
praxis, and therefore history, and this is precisely what he refuses to
do. Of course his perspective remains historical. He distinguishes be-
tween epochs, a before and an after. But he replaces cinema with a
magic lantern, and movement with a succession of immobilities.
2
104 U LECTURE 7
Despite their critical intention, Sartre's remarks are absolutely appropriate as a
description of Foucault's procedure (I am leaving the polemics of the interview
aside: it answers a prior polemic on the part of Foucault against Sartre that is also
of little interest to us). What he does not mention, however, is that Foucault is
by no means the inventor of this type of historiography, but that-apart from the
French epistemologists Heidegger too, whom many consider the one in whom
the thinking of historicity culminated, completely severed the history of Being
from the opinions and actions of subjects. For the essential thought that gave the
ultimate impulse to the strange talk about a history of Being was, after all, that
subjects always only arrive at their self-understanding in an already "cleared"
world, i.e., in a world that is already furnished with meaning; and to this extent
they cannotexcept at the price of a circlebe considered the hermeneutical or
practical authors or coauthors who establish such a symbolical order. By holding
on to this idea-which Bachelard also presupposes, without supporting it ontolog-
ically or epistemologically Foucault is in a sense more consistent than Sartre.
Therefore we do not want to reject immediately and polemically the fundamental
insight of Foucault's archaeology the Schleiermacherian "germinal idea."
Rather we want to concede that it has a certain consistency.
At the beginning of his book, Foucault claims in a biographical note that it was
through a text by Jorge Luis Borges the he was first struck with the idea of writing
The Order of Things. Borges quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia that suggests
the following classification of animals.
(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking
pigs, (e) sirens, (0 fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine
camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.
Foucault comments:
In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one
great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the
exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own,
the stark impossibility of thinking that. {OT, xv)
The amused wonderment about the fact that a foreign culture collects what is so
obviously disconnected under the heading of "classification of animals" makes ap-
parent, through contrast, the nonnecessity (i.e., the historical relativity) of our
own schemes of thought. We then turn to them "with the estranging eye of the
anthropologist" or the "archaeologist" for whom familiarity with a culture with
his culture-could only be an obstacle preventing him from studying attentively
and without prejudice the foreignness of the foreign. For indeed, what could be
a greater obstacle to the study of the thought processes according to which the
LECTURE 7 U 105
Chinese classification was accomplished than the Eurocentric refusal "of thinking
that! One thing, of course, is necessary to make sure that the wonderment about
the foreignness of the foreign reflects back on the archaeologist as a wonderment
about the foreignness and non-self-evidence of the familiar: one has to make cer-
tain that the foreign (and the familiar as well) are effects of what Foucault calls
a "thinking." Apparently all thinking moves within the context of a symbolic order
by virtue of which "Being" is disclosed-in a way that is linguistically and cultur-
ally determined-to the members of a specific linguistic and cultural context. To
admit this is not to maintain that it always is, or must be, one and the same order
within which the members of this order communicate. If we call discourse, in a
still-vague approximation, a cultural order that allows all subjects socialized un-
der its reign to talk with each other and to interact, then we will presume that there
is always an order of discourse, but not necessarily always one order of all dis-
courses. Such a superorder, such a universal metadiscourse, was the dream of
the European episteme as manifest in differing ways in the Enlightenment, in
idealism, and in the Utopia of technical-scientific world domination. If one only
and without exception calls "thinking" a movement within the boundaries of
rational discursive formation, then it is very difficult-and Foucault jokingly
demonstrates these difficulties-to accept the Chinese classification for animals
as the product of thinking. At least this is how Foucault seems to use the term
"thinking," for he calls this classification unthinkable since it holds no smallest
common denominator and no intelligible reasons for its divisions, unless the rules
of the language in which it is composed can be considered to be such: "Yet,
though language can spread them before us, it can only do so in an unthinkable
space" (xvii). No "wtopia," but rather an "atopia": i.e., the loss of a "common
space" (topos) among the listed objects and thus of one (image of the) world that
unites them (xviii).
I am not certain whether it is very apt to call what is foreign unthinkable. Who-
ever speaks in this fashion presupposes that only the familiar can be understood
(or thought), whereas, as we know, no order of thinking was, is, or will ever be
stable; and yet we nevertheless can communicate with each other more or less
successfully about our world and our intentions. The ability to "divine" and dis-
close foreign meaning, even without completely mastering the underlying "code,"
is generally greatly underestimated in structuralism.
Be that as it may, the actual deprivation or what was experienced as such-of
a familiar scheme of order can suddenly make us aware that our presumably so
freely moving thoughts always hold on to an instituted contextual order whose
reliability alone allows us to think something as something (and not as something
else), and to arrive at a consensus with other thinking beings about it. To this ex-
tent an exclusion of the unthinkable lies at the origin of all order: a keeping-at-a-
distance of everything that will be rejected by the rules of the discourse as some-
thing that does not make sense, or that will be prohibited as hostile to the system.
106 LECTURE 7
Foucault amply demonstrated this in his previous books on the history of madness
and on the birth of the clinic (and of the medical gaze). In his preface he remarks:
What historical a priori provided the starting-point from which it was
possible to define the great checkerboard of distinct identities estab-
lished against the confused, undefined, faceless, and, as it were, in-
different background of differences? The history of madness would be
the history of the Otherof that which, for a given culture, is at once
interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (so as to exorcize the in-
terior danger) but by being shut away (in order to reduce its otherness);
whereas the history of the order imposed on things would be the history
of the Same-of that which, for a given culture, is both dispersed and
related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected to-
gether into identities. (OT, xxiv)
According to this observation, discursive (or, as Lacan likes to say: symbolic)
orders function in the first instance by excluding or including/confining (in order
to keep under control) whatever opposes their principle of construction; second,
they function by gathering under the unity of the same whatever is consistent with
this principle. This is exactly how we defined a closed system (a closed structure):
all distinctions produced by articulation disclose themselves as effects of one and
the same act of structuring (for struere means to construct what was formerly
divided and disconnected according to an order). This is likewise true for the
great systems of philosophy or of classical physics: they distinguish and divide
their elements, but according to rigid principles that let the different be recog-
nized as instances of one and the same (the ground of differentiation and the
ground of relation only occur together). An image of the world knows many
words and expressions, and yet it remains the same in all of them. Likewise,
Hegel's spirit remains the same in all its manifestations. On this point Foucault
comments:
In fact, there is no similitude and no distinction, even for the wholly
untrained perception, that is not the result of a precise operation and of
the application of a preliminary criterion. A "system of elements"a
definition of the segments by which the resemblances and differences
can be shown, the types of variation by which those segments can be
affected, and, lastly, the threshold above which there is a difference and
below which there is a similitude-is indispensable for the establishment
of even the simplest form of order. Order is, at one and the same time,
that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that
determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has
no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a
language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order
manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for
the moment of expression, (xx)
LECTURE 7 107
A completely conventional characterization of what we called structure or sys-
tem; at the conclusion of the passage, however, we again find the characteristic
attempt to exclude from "order" any contribution of a constitutive subject. (One
could make a fitting observation already at this point, one that will be developed
later: what is excluded from Foucault's thinking is the subject; it is put under the
thought prohibition he so penetratingly examined in the "dispositives of power"
and in the exclusionary mechanisms of penalty and confinement.) This is given
away by the phrase that is so characteristic of Foucault and other neostruc-
turalists: in the domain of order things look at each other. That means that it is
not a subject observing or reflecting on them; rather order itself, as their autono-
mous self-reflection, is what metaphysics called the subject. The old subject
disappearsas the confined Other of the orderin the white squares of the graph
paper, only to rise again as the potential of a possible statement. (I have deliber-
ately chosen my words, although I have only paraphrased Foucault: for struc-
turalism/neostructuralism does not completely succeed in the banishment of the
subject; it survives as a kind of potential, as an empty position pregnant with
meaning. We will yet have occasion to ask ourselves whether the idealists, or
Husserl, or Sartre actually conceived the subject much differently than this.)
Foucault, by the way, does not simply leave the given definition of order as
it is. Similar to Lvi-Strauss, who defined myth as something in between the re-
versible order of langue and the irreversible order of parole, he wants to see the
discourses, whose investigation The Order of Things pursues, understood as
second-degree orders. Unfortunately, it is not especially clear what Foucault
means with this definition of his key term. If I am correct, this second-degree or-
der or "middle region" (xxi) means something like this: no culture presents the
simple and unequivocal mirror image of what we know as its "fundamental
codes," for example, "those governing its language, its schmas of perception,
its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices" (xx). Nor
is culture identical with the scientific or philosophical theories that either justify
this order on the basis of a principle, or examine it in its systematic composition,
i.e., that take a reflective and systematic position with regard to the order of the
life-world. The "empirical" and "philosophical-theoretical" view of order tends
rather toward extremes between which a third can be insertedthe one we are
looking forabout which Foucault maintains that it is not less fundamental (pas
moins fondamental), although its blueprint is less strict and thus more difficult to
analyze.
It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical
orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial sepa-
ration from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relin-
quishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to
discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the
108 D LECTURE 7
best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that
there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in
themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken
order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself
to some extent from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the
culture superimposed on them another kind of grid which neutralized
them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them
at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to
face with order in its primary state. It is on the basis of this newly per-
ceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are
criticized and rendered partially invalid. It is on the basis of this order,
taken as a firm foundation, that general theories as to the ordering of
things, and the interpretation that such an ordering involves, will be
constructed. Thus, between the already "encoded" eye and reflexive
knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself, (xx-xxi)
I assume that Foucault understands by this intermediate order all those culture-
specific and epoch-specific interpretations that, on the one hand, are "less orderly"
(plus confus, plus obscur) than what he calls the level of econnaissances; i.e.,
scientifically supported knowledge; on the other hand, they are richer and more
concrete than the "primary codes" that uniformly determine our language, our
manners, our perception, and our social conventions. We could be dealing with
something that has affinities in part with Husserl's "life-world," and in part with
traditional "worldviews" or "ideologies." Foucault says that they can "se donner
comme [l'ordre] la plus fondamentale": more familiar, more everyday, more
deeply rooted, more reliable even than words, perceptions, and gestures through
which they are expressed; more solid, original, archaic and, so to speak, "truer"
than the theories that seek to sublate them in a comprehensive and explicit expla-
nation; something which, it seems to me, is thoroughly comparable to Heideg-
ger's "world"-understood as an articulated context of assignments and
involvements since it likewise "preontologically" precedes the knowledge of
signs and life forms, as well as scientific reflection and formalization. In any
caseit is, of course, unsatisfying not to know exactly what the object of a scien-
tific study is Foucault's book concerns itself with these second-degree grids of
order. They are designated as "historical a prions" that indicate, prior to any
scientific examination, the empirical and "positive" conditions of possibility on
the basis of which a certain civilization organizes its speech acts, accomplishes
its acts of exchange, lives its social life, and looks at its world. Again, Ricoeur's
formula (of a "Kantism without a transcendental subject") fits quite well as a
description of Foucault's approach. Foucault departs from the epistemological
and knowledge-sociological endeavors of Bachelard or the "Annales" group, for
example, in that he does not treat traditional disciplines and "objective" knowl-
edge; rather he researches the discursive conditions under which, among other
LECTURE 7 109
things, they too (but also all prescientific orders) were able to arise (which only
in part are reflected and completed in epistemes, in veritable modes of knowl-
edge). Foucault is more interested in the conditions of creation than in the struc-
tures of what is created. But one should not understand the term "constitution"
in the sense of a historistic or transcendental-philosophical "deduction": for Fou-
cault, the ground on which an order is constituted can never be a subject; rather
it is, once again, an orderthat of discourse in its last stage with its regard dj
cod. For the same reason the succession of "positivities
,,
cannotin a Hegelian
mannerbe conceived as a teleological process.
I am not concerned, therefore, to describe the progress of knowledge
towards an objectivity in which today's science can finally be recog-
nized; what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological
field, the episteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all
criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms,
grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that
of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility;
in this account, what should appear are those configurations within the
space of knowledge which have given rise to the diverse forms of em-
pirical science. Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the
traditional meaning of that word, as an "archaeology." (OT, xxii)
It would be useful if we could find out more about the methodological details
of the conception of archaeology. Unfortunately, Foucault only satisfies our wish
for more information in a later book, his Discours de la mthode, as it were:
namely, his Archaeology of Knowledge to which he refers at this point. We will
concern ourselves with it in lecture 11.
In The Order of Things we have to infer the breadth of the concept of "archaeol-
ogy" from the manner of its concrete and historical application; for here Foucault
is interested not so much in a methodological as in a contentual problem. One can
express it with the following question: how did this strange phenomenon of the
human sciences (sciences humaines) historically evolve? What are its discursive
"conditions of possibility"? (The Order of Things, after all, has the subtitle: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences.)
This question is of special interest to us, for the human sciences the scientific
analysis of the human being as something that in its mode of Being is radically
different from all other beings in natureconstitute a paradigm of scientific ques-
tioning whose right to exist is emphatically put into question by discourse analy-
sis. One should not rashly confuse "human sciences" with what in Germany is
called Geisteswissenschaften or with what in the Anglo-Saxon world is termed
"moral sciences" (since Mill), that is, with what we call hermeneutics, for exam-
ple. Instead, Foucault includes disciplines like linguistics, philology, biology, an-
thropology, and economics in this category; we could also add sociology or
110 LECTURE 7
psychology, including psychoanalysis, which Foucault mentions at times (OT,
373ff.). All these are "sciences" (Wissenschaften), in the literal sense of the word,
which would not uncritically accept Gadamer's division of "truth and method"of
hermeneutical-historical approaches and procedures that are oriented on the ideal
of objectivity characteristic of the exact sciences as valid for their disciplines.
Nevertheless, we must and may at least also hear echoes of the (German) concept
of Geisteswissenschaften in the concept of the human sciences. Foucault, to be
sure, does not speak very penetratingly about the discussion of hermeneutics in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (his book is rather Franco-centric with re-
gard to its sources, despite its claim to all-European validity). Some of his theses
about the human sciences and the image of the world inscribed in them, however,
seem to me to make sense only if one also relates them to hermeneutics (in the
German sense of the word). Foucault states very clearly that neither biology nor
linguistics is, as it were, a human science per se: they become such only on the
basis of a certain interpretation of their subject matter. According to this interpre-
tation, underlying all cognitive processes there exists a subjective being (Weseri)
without whose "representations" nothing of that which occurs in society, life, and
language would acquire meaning. Using the example of linguistics (which, as we
said, is not a human science per se) Foucault says:
The object of the human sciences is not language (though it is spoken
by men alone); it is that being which, from the interior of the language
by which he is surrounded, represents to himself, by speaking, the
sense of the words or propositions he utters, and finally provides him-
self with a representation of language itself. (353)
This recourse, which, according to Foucault, is inherent to all human sciences,
to an all-representing subject which itself, however, cannot be represented in all
its depth (since it constitutes all representability) has obvious hermeneutical ambi-
tions that we should not ignore (for explicit references to historical hermeneutics,
see 372-73). Foucault's "archaeology," therefore, was soon understood, espe-
cially in Germany, as an alternative to the hermeneutically founded social
sciences, and, I believe, rightly so. Thus it is all the more strange that hermeneu-
tics with characteristic magnanimity thus far has ignored Foucault's challenge.
Why?
Foucault's procedure is not teleological, i.e., not directed toward a goal. He
does not assert (as do, for example, Schelling, Heidegger, and Derrida) that in
the West (or, to speak more moderately, in modern times) an interpretation
of Being exists and is reinforced that is nothing but the fantasy of a self-
empowerment of subjectivity, and this means at the same time, an obscuration
of Being, whose twilight we experienced in the human sciences.
3
By contrast, the
process, whose "historical a priori foundations" Foucault as archaeologist dis-
covers, is nonnecessary and contingent. Nevertheless, he is of the opinion that
LECTURE 7 U 111
each form of knowledge can be described as a transformation of the previous form
of knowledge, and thus, as a succession of epistemesto be sure, not a meaning-
ful transformation (carried out in the service of an intentional projection). To the
extent that this is the case, Sartre was completely correct in speaking of a geology
of the human sciences, and in adding that Foucault leaves us completely in the
dark about how the transition from one form of knowledge to another takes place.
Without the possibility of understanding this process, there is no way of distin-
guishing archaeology from something like a natural history in which a species
Homo sapiens sapiens appears and perishes-a brief bright flame before the
planet burns itself out. Foucault, in fact, actually sees it this way, and he even
derives a certain comfort and profound peace of mind from this natural-historical
gaze that thinks in millennia rather than in centuries. For my part, I am not certain
to what extent this can cheer up the reader and lull her/his soul into a state of
peace. Judge for yourselves.
Strangely enough, man the study of whom is supposed by the naive to
be the oldest investigation since Socrates is probably no more that a
kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration
whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently
taken up in the field of knowledge. Whence all the chimeras of the new
humanisms, all the facile solutions of an "anthropology" understood as a
universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical. It is
comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man
is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new
wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as
that knowledge has discovered a new form, (xxiii)
Basically, genealogy (in the sense of Darwin and Nietzsche) and historicism are
allied in this concept. It is historistic I know that this label estranges on first
sight-that Foucault describes the history of the images of the world as one that
is subject to no teleology. Each history has the same right as every other one, none
brings to light the definitive truth of humanity; all are, according to Ranke's fa-
mous phrase, "equally immediate to God." But Foucault's archaeology only
shares with historicism the moral and epistemological indifference, not the claim
to understanding (see OT, 372-73). It shares this renunciation of understanding,
on the other hand, with genealogy. "Genealogical" does not mean "genetic," but
rather almost the opposite. When Darwin overthrew Lamarck's model for the
evolution of species (which assumed that the transformation of species was the
result of meaningful and inherited acts of adaptation), he destroyed, to make a
long story short, the paradigm of teleology in the human sciences. The human
being did not evolve from the animal kingdom by virtue of some secret "decision
of nature for freedom" (as in Hegel or Herder), but rather on the basis of genetic
mutations and mechanisms of selection that offered the best chances of survival
112 LECTURE 7
to the best-adapted organism. Whoever describes history in terms of genealogy
never seeks to understand the transition from one formation to another as some-
thing subjective or intended by God's guiding will; he rather describes in a com-
pletely value-free manner the different configurations that, without intelligible
reason, offered a greater chance of survival to one type of knowledge rather than
to the previous one.
4
The genealogical procedure (Foucault occasionally calls it
this himself, referring to Nietzsche, of course) describes transformations of
paradigms, epistemes, or "discursive orders" as events without intelligible rea-
son. If he were to mention a reason for the change from one episteme to another,
then his procedure would be comparable to that of teleology, which would bring
into play a praxis that meaningfully projects itself onto its future. This renuncia-
tion of explanation of meaning and of motivated derivation of epistemes forces
Foucault's "archaeology" into a characteristic narrative gesture: in retrospect,
everything is described as if it had to occur as a necessary derivation from a
"historical a priori."
5
This historical a priori, however, is, in reality, only a
ground of legitimation projected into the transcendental (or, as Foucault says,
into the "empirical transcendental") for the factual subsistence of this already ex-
isting discursive order.
6
The ineffectuality of taking up the standpoint of a coun-
terreality (a "counterfactuality") over against the positively existing, and then to
criticize it from that standpoint, seems to me to give Foucault's "archaeology" a
conservative bent, which based on his approach, not on the subjective morality
of the author-drives it even deeper into positivism (i.e., into the factual collabo-
ration with the factual) than what was probably meant by Foucault's audacious
self-characterization of himself as a happy positivist (AK, 125).
I say "was probably meant," for I am in no way overlooking the fact that the
temperament Foucault's attacks on the human sciences display on all fronts also
has a critical motive, just as his analyses of clinical, psychiatric, and penal con-
finement derive from a critical impulse. What I mean, simply, is that the radical-
ized historicism of the archaeological procedure presents no possibility for
justifying the inherent implicit ethics of the procedure as such, for an ethics
reduced to a historical a priori loses its normative power and becomes one impo-
tent "positivity" (to use Foucault's favorite term) among others. A positivity is
given (gegeben), but a task that needs to be done is set (aufgegeben). A positivity
is; the liberation of subjects from governmental repression should be (and thus
is not). In my opinion, Foucault can only deceive himself about the nature of the
ethics that secretly guides him (and thus, his teleology) by taking his interpreta-
tions of the discursive formations that he analyzed as objective characteristics of
the things themselves, and thus as results of deductive conclusions from epistemes
whose historical a priori was supposedly only just brought to light. In reality,
however, "positivity" even that of the human sciences is only the precipitate,
LECTURE 7 U 113
projected into the objective, of a teleological process of exegesis and interpre-
tation.
Be that as it may, Foucault's "archaeology of the human sciences" deserves to
have its fundamental characteristics presented, if only for the sake of its concrete
assertions. The book is concerned with two paradigm changes: one between late
medieval/early modern thinking and the thinking of the Enlightenment (Foucault
calls this enlightened thinking, with an eye for the situation in France, the "think-
ing of the classical age"); and another such rupture between the thinking of the
Enlightenment and that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is, of the
epoch which is characterized by the discovery of man and the human sciences.
To preclassical thinking, Foucault says, the world was interprtable on the ba-
sis of the universal analogy of all realms of Being: due to correlations based on
similarity, everything is reminiscent of everything else, and the totality of all liv-
ing beings, for its part, appears in the form of analogy to the superior Being (sum-
mum ens). What interests Foucault most is that even the relation between the sig-
nifying form (form signante) and the form of the signified (form du signe) is
conceived as a correlation based on similarity of the sort that the sign as thing
is connected with what it signifies by virtue of a relation of participation.
Let us call the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to make
the signs speak and to discover their meaning, hermeneutics; let us call
the totality of the learning and skills that enable one to distinguish the
location of the signs, to define what constitutes them as signs, and to
know how and by what laws they are linked, semiology: the sixteenth
century superimposed hermeneutics and semiology in the form of
similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance.
To search for the law governing signs is to discover the things that are
alike. The grammar of beings is an exegesis of these things. And what
the language they speak has to tell us is quite simply what the syntax is
that binds them together. The nature of things, their coexistence, the
way in which they are linked together and communicate is nothing
other than their resemblance. And that resemblance is visible only in
the network of signs that crosses the world from one end to the other.
(Or, 29)
This conception of the sign (and also of writing) as a thing that, although it does
not preserve a fully transparent view through to the summum ens, does, however,
preserve an (indirect, mediated by similarity) participation in it (35-36), is
shaken in the transition to the classical episteme, i.e., at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. We note in passing how traditional Foucault's treatment of the
conceptions of epoch is in the final analysis, and to what extent he falls into
the trap of employing such collective singulars of classical intellectual
historiography in spite of his persuasive methodological objections to the use of
stratified concepts such as, for example, the "spirit of the age" (Zeitgeist) or the
114 LECTURE 7
"objective spirit." Up to this point-at least, since Stoicism in the Western world
the system of signs was founded on a tripartite relation: /signanssignatum
Tt>YX<*vov (conjoncture) (OT, 42). Signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifi)
were interconnected by means of something that stood between them and that
bridged their irreconcilability (for example, similarity). This bond of a natural
proximity of words and things breaks down with the entrance into the epoch of
Enlightenment. From this point on the sign relation is only binary: assignment
of one signifier to one signified. However, since the connecting element TO
TUYX<*VOV (la conjoncture) is missing, this assignment has to be grounded
differently, and, according to Foucault, this is accomplished by means of
representation (42ff.). A text that exhibits this "epistemological break" exception-
ally well is, according to Foucault, Don Quixote, whose protagonist, constantly
searching for similarities, instead everywhere comes across the chimeras and
reflexes of his eccentric reading of chivalric romances. The reader's laughter un-
masks the fact that this world of similarities no longer functions.
Resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; simili-
tudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or madness;
things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity: they are no
longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own,
without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness; they are no
longer the marks of things; they lie sleeping between the pages of
books and covered in dust. (47-48)
In the Enlightenment world the relation between the world of words and the world
of things is no longer given: it must first be established (arbitrarily) by means of
intervention of procedures of ordering and coordination. The classical episteme,
defined as the totality of historical a prioris (or conditions of possibility) that de-
termine the thinking of the epoch, is therefore based on a general science of order
within whose framework analysis (the hollowing out or dekernelization of identi-
ties and the segregation of differences) becomes the universal principle of cogni-
tion. Reason becomes "analytical," it takes apart the complex syntheses of feudal-
ism, of synthetic reason, and of correlations of similarity. The loss of a natural
synthesis between things and signs forces reason, as it were, to develop in a
countermove artificial orders, taxonomies, grammars, etc., in which the perti-
nence of the signs is based on positing, on arbitrary assignment. And this ar-
bitrary principle of assignment Foucault calls reprsentation. Knowledge no
longer reproduces the natural orderedness of the world; rather it brings the world
in order, so to speak, for the first time: "since it [the order of the world] was now
accomplished according to the order laid down by thought, progressing naturally
from the simple to the complex" (54). The naturalness of a world based on rela-
tions of similarity is torn down and reconstructed according to the blueprint of
analytical rationality in which the deceptive semblance of the sensual world is
LECTURE 7 D 115
cognitively penetrated ("enlightened"), and in which from now on everything is
assigned to the place that is appropriate to it "in reality" and "by right." The old
hierarchies are abraded and stratified by dismantling-"analysis" means literally
"to dismantle, to take apart." Similarity cannot stand up to the procedure of
differentiating comparison; the supposedly synthetic unity of the world gives way
to the endeavor of compiling as complete as possible a list of its details; the in-
tellectual activity of the mind consists no longer in the connection of circum-
stances and things, but rather in their separation. And finally for knowledge is
differentiation history and science are strictly segregated: historical traditions
are deceptive, and thus one has to examine them from the judgment bench of rea-
son; traditions are not pertinent merely because they were thus far believed and
because they have remained a part of a living tradition, but rather because, and
to the extent that, they survive critical examination (55-56). (It is well known that
Kant was negatively disposed to historical education as the concern of transcen-
dental philosophy: the educated person thinks in terms of traditions, and thus be-
lieves in this or that, instead of authentically examining it here and now and mak-
ing a decision through use of transhistorical rationality.)
Foucault, of course, is mostly interested in the sign theory of the Enlighten-
ment.
7
"What is a sign in the classical age?" (07, 58). And what he tells us about
it was justifiably called one of the most informative, stimulating, but also most
confusing passages of his book. The fundamental thought is the idea that in the
absence of a "natural bond" between signified and signifier (as was still present
in the Renaissance in the thought of similarity), "representation" had to step into
the middle ("a bond of representation"; 65) in order to establish the referential
character of signs. Representation, therefore, does not belong to the natural or-
der, but has its origins in convention: the sign becomes, in short, an instrument
of the analytically controlled use of reason, of knowledge (60ff.). Whether some-
thing is a sign or not, and if it is, to what it refers, is decided by the conclusions
of a transhistorical reason, and these conclusions re-present themselves in the use
of signs, for example, as "universal language," or as characteristica universalis.
The conventionality of the sign presupposes
that the relation of the sign to its content is not guaranteed by the order
of things in themselves. The relation of the sign to the signified now re-
sides in a space in which there is no longer any intermediary figure to
connect them: what connects them is a bond established, inside knowl-
edge, between the idea of one thing and the idea of another. (63)
This missing mediation between sign and signified is difficult to conceive. In fact,
Foucault claims, it is the only possibility the sign has for being a direct representa-
tion of thought or knowledge: no intermediary element intrudes into the synthesis
of the sign and obscures its transparency.
116 <3 LECTURE 7
This is because there is no intermediary element, no opacity intervening
between the sign and its content. Signs, therefore, have no other laws
than those that may govern their contents: any analysis of signs is at the
same time, and without need for further inquiry, the decipherment of
what they are trying to say. Inversely, the discovery of what is signified
is nothing more than a reflection upon the signs that indicate it. (66)
This transparency derives from the fact that the things that take on the function
of a sign (and thus represent another thing) do this in such a way that they repre-
sent their act of representing in themselves a second time: "The signifying idea
becomes double, since superimposed upon the idea that is replacing another there
is also the idea of its representative power" (64). "From the Classical age, the sign
is the representativity of the representation in so far as it is representable" (65).
From this one can infer, according to Foucault: first, the coexistence of represent-
ing (of using a sign) and thinking (every thinking is an image, a representation
of something, but in a way that it, for its part, penetrates and recognizes its
representativity); and second, that there is no need for a special theory of the sign
(for one cannot theorize about the sign as though about a particular object of
thinking, because all thinking is self-conscious and reasonable representing).
You probably noticed that Foucault uses the concept of representation in a
slightly different manner than we would expect after our still superficial knowl-
edge of Saussure's and Derrida's critique of the representational model of lan-
guage. Saussure proved that the naive conception, according to which there are
ideas in themselves (or thoughts, or elementary perceptions) that are then as-
signed a name according to convention, is untenable. But when Foucault asserts
about the thinking of the Enlightenment that in it words "have been allotted the
task and the power of'representing thought' " (78), he does not want to say that
previously existing representational contents are retroactively translated into
signs.
But representing in this case does not mean translating, giving a visible
version of, fabricating a material double that will be able, on the exter-
nal surface of the body, to reproduce thought in its exactitude. Repre-
senting must be understood in the strict sense: language represents
thought as thought represents itself. (OT, 78)
However, if this is supposed to be the opinion of the Enlightenment, then to what
extent, you will ask, does this classical model essentially differ from the general
semiology of Saussure? Not fundamentally, is Foucault's brief and surprising
answer.
If the sign is the pure and simple connection between what signifies and
what is signified . . . then the relation can be established only within
the general element of representation: the signifying element and the
LECTURE 7 D 117
signified element are linked only in so far as they are (or have been or
can be) represented, and in so far as the one actually represents the
other. It was therefore necessary that the Classical theory of the sign
should provide itself with an "ideology" to serve as its foundation and
philosophical justification, that is, a general analysis of all forms of
representation, from elementary sensation to the abstract and complex
idea. It was also necessary that Saussure, rediscovering the project of a
general semiology, should have given the sign a definition that could
seem "psychologistic" (the linking of a concept and an image): this is
because he was in fact rediscovering the Classical condition for con-
ceiving of the binary nature of the sign. (67)
With this Saussure would become the rediscoverer and reutilizer of a classical
formation of knowledge that was temporarily buried or disturbed by three figures
(from Schleiermacher to Nietzsche and Freud) and by three theories that chal-
lenge the sign's self-representativity in different ways (OT, 74-75). With Saus-
sure there occurred what at the end of The Order of Things is called the return
of language (le retour du langage) (384).
The task of the next lecture will be to attempt to explain this rehabilitation of
"representation," which is astonishing within the context of a discussion of neo-
structuralism, in order to pave the way for what Foucault calls the overthrow of
the paradigm of "representation" by the paradigm of "historical consciousness."
Lecture 8
Following up on the history of two epochal ruptures presented by Foucault in The
Order of Things, we find ourselves at a point where a world interpreted by means
of similarities is replaced by a relationship between signs and states of affairs
founded on the principle of representation. Foucault views representation as the
central feature of discourse in the Enlightenment, that is, in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe (and mainly France).
Over the course of this series of lectures we have already come across the
concept of representationof "re-presencing" something previously already
presentas one of the main targets of neo structural ism's critique. A model of
signs based on representation assumes that signs portray either elementary per-
ceptions of the senses, or elementary (inherent) ideas of the human mind, i.e.,
that they give in retrospect (and for the purpose of communication) a sensual form
to entities that are immediately present to the mind's eye even without designa-
tion. Needless to say, neither mind nor language consists solely of simple ele-
ments; there are also synthetic combinations. However, the classical model of
representation assumes that the syntheses by means of which speech combines
words of different classes (and thus representations of different types of intellec-
tual and/or sensual activities or apperceptions) to form sentences are linguistic
representations of the preceding syntheses by means of which the mind joins word
images of elementary impressions or of thoughts with predicates to make judg-
ments. The syntax of a language, thus, would be the mirroring of the logical
forms of judgment as they are characteristic of the mind. Given this precondition,
there exists a preestablished harmony between the eternal conclusions of (theo-
1i
LteiuKh u ny
logically or rationally conceived) reason and the linguistic forms in which rational
judgments are articulated in sentences and as sentences. To understand a sentence
would hence mean to understand what is reasonable in it (the unreasonable, for
example, the res imperceptibilis of the Evangelists who believed in miracles, can-
not be understood); and reasonable is (in a strangely circular conclusion) "what-
ever kind of thoughts words, according to reason and the laws of the soul, can
awaken in us."
1
Such reasonable thoughts composed according to the invariant "laws of the
soul" always depict things as they in themselves are, independent of individual
interpretation. Therefore, sentences that are based on axioms of reason, and that
as such can immediately lay claim to truth (necessity of thought, pertinence, and
generality), do not, strictly speaking, need to be mediated by acts of understand-
ing. Indeed, one could say that they are understandable "on their own" by virtue
of equal participation of the communicating partners in one common reason. At
any rate, history is not the measure of their truth; rather the historical context in
which they appear is suspected of disguising their reasonableness, of obscuring
it or holding it hostage in a web of myths and other superstitious patterns of in-
terpretation such as those that are characteristic of primitive populations. The task
of interpretation consists, then, in liberating the possible truth of a given text (or
a perceived speech)-and this in general means at the same time: liberating the
truth of the thing or idea that is signified by that text or speechby means of
procedures of critical segregation, or by historically explaining the unreasonable
estrangements they have undergone. The famous perspectival limitation of the in-
terpreter, as it is expressed in Chladen's theory of the viewpoint (Sehe-Punckt),
only appears to relativize this standpoint; in reality, he claims no more and no
less than that a thing can be observed from numerous sides, without the different
judgments made about it (for example, "the rose is pale red" and "the rose smells
strong") being logically incompatible.
2
In broad simplification one could say that
until the middle of the eighteenth century interpretation did not play a role as a
specific problem in the language-grounded forms of knowledge because linguistic
form, in its truth, mirrors a logical form, and because the logical form of the syn-
thetic judgments refers immediately to facts, so that reasonable speech coincides
with speech pertinent to the facts; the problem of an agreement about the specific
use of a statement or about the manner of the linguistic construction of the world
does not even arise. If, however, the laws of reason are universal, the same must
be true for the laws of grammar in which reason is represented. Enlightenment's
system of relations is conceived as universal grammar, i.e., as a system of sig-
nifieds that is arbitrarily represented by different signifiers in different languages,
without fundamental problems of translation between these languages occurring,
at least insofar as these languages are manifestations of the same universal reason.
Now as we recall, Saussure (and Derrida who even outdid him) took exception
to this model of linguistic representation of reasonable thoughts and reason-
120 U LECTURE 8
able judgments, asserting that mind, without mediation by signs, remains amor-
phous and thus cannot be thought as something that, portraying itself, is merely
repeated in the order of signs. What Foucault presents with the word reprsenter
as the feature of the classical episteme deviates in a strange fashion from such a
description of the function of representation. For Foucault believes that Saus-
surean structuralism does not introduce an epistemological revolution in the
twentieth century, but rather that it accomplishes a mere reconstruction of the
classical concept of representation. The so-called historical grammarfrom
Bopp through Meillet-is nothing other than a "philological episode" that inter-
rupted the continuity between the grammar of Port Royal and Saussurean
semiology.
And after all, between the last "philosophical," "general," or "reasoned"
grammars and Saussure's Cours, less than a century passed; in both,
there is the same reference, whether explicit or not, to a theory of signs
of which the analysis of language would only be a particular and singu-
larly complex case; in both, the same attempt to define the conditions of
functioning common to all languages; in both, the same privilege ac-
corded the present organization of language and the same reference to
explain a grammatical fact through evolution or historical remanence:
the same will to analyze grammar not as a set of more or less coherent
precepts, but as a system inside of which a reason would have to be
found for all the facts, and for the very ones which appear to be the
most deviant.
3
If this is the case, then either structuralism ("modern linguistics") is in reality a
premodern discourse formation, or, inversely, the discourse of the Enlighten-
ment was already structural. Foucault agrees that "it is not easy to give a precise
meaning to these coincidences" (iv). We are dealing, of course, with "two differ-
ent epistemological configurations," which, nevertheless, maintain a number of
obvious similarities. Foucault even speaks of a "partial isomorphism of two
figures that are in principle foreign to one another" (iv). Chomsky's idea of a
"Cartesian linguistics" points in this direction (v). (The work of Karl Marx under-
goes in Foucault a similarly ambiguous demotion; it deviates from the work of
the bourgeois economist Ricardo only "on the level of opinion": "At the deepest
level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity"; OT,
261.) Comparing Grimm's and Bopp's historical grammar with Saussure's semiol-
ogy, Foucault actually concludes:
And it was for this very reason that Saussure had to by-pass this mo-
ment in the history of the spoken word, which was a major event for
the whole of nineteenth-century philology, in order to restore, beyond
its historical forms, the dimension of language in general, and to re-
open, after such neglect, the old problem of the sign, which had con-
LECTURE 8 D 121
tinued to animate the whole of thought from Port-Royal to the last of
the "Idologues." . . .
It is well known that Saussure was able to escape from this di-
achronic vocation of philology only by restoring the relation of lan-
guage to representation, at the expense of reconstituting a "semiology"
which, like general grammar, defined the sign as the connection be-
tween two ideas. (OT, 286, 294)
One can hardly imagine a greater antithesis, both to Derrida's and to the her-
meneutical interpretation of Saussure. And although we do not want to overlook
the fact that Foucault, in contrast to Derrida, does not simply describe linguistic
representation as the sensual expression of something in itself nonsensual, it is
nevertheless clear that he takes over the definition of Port Royal that states: "The
sign encloses two ideas, one of the thing representing, the other of the thing repre-
sented; and its nature consists in exciting the first by means of the second."
4
Such
a binary concept of the sign, however, falls prey to all those objections that Der-
rida already brought against Saussure's division of signification and value, for as
long as the side of expression is distinguishable from the side of meaning, one
cannot reduce the "meaning" of a sign entirely to the "principle of difference";
i.e., one cannot dissolve it entirely in the occurrence of articulation. Like a jack-
in-the-box it rises again and again as articulation's authentic and distinguishable
purpose from the chain of voice production (chane phonatoire).
Be that as it may, the fact that Foucault treats (although not necessarily tren-
chantly) Saussure's semiology under the chapter heading "The Return of Lan-
guage" (OT, 303ff.), and that he welcomes it as an event that sounds the funeral
bell for the human sciences, allows two conclusions. First, the Foucault of The
Order of Things is by no means that consistent representative of an anti-
Enlightenment attitude for which Jean Amery's polemics attacked him; at least
in regard to his clinging to a representational model of language he himself is
rather a premodern thinker, at heart archiviste (and rational). Second, we can
see that Foucault takes on a special, or marginal, position within the totality of
neostructuraiism since he is the only one who does not let go of the (although mo-
dified) representational model of the sign.
It was Franois Wahl who, in the second part of his essay "La Philosophie
entre l'avant et l'aprs du structuralisme," most penetratingly pointed out this sec-
ond consequence.
5
There he states that in Foucault we can observe the strange
phenomenon of a critic of the Western episteme who believes that he can approach
the structures that underlie all thought processes with, of all things, the prestruc-
turalist representational model of designation or of knowledge as it was developed
in the Enlightenment. Not only Derrida's classification of Foucaultian archaeol-
ogy under logocentrism supports this observation; in addition, we can cite numer-
122 LECTURE 8
ous confessions by Foucault himself. We already mentioned the most important
one: Foucault speaks of a complete transparency of the signifier to the signified.
In fact, the signifying element has no content, no function, and no de-
termination other than what it represents: it is entirely ordered upon and
transparent to it. But this content is indicated only in a representation
that posits itself as such, and that which is signified resides, without
residuum and without opacity, within the representation of the sign.
(OT 64)
This complete transparency of the sign to itself is in many ways similar to the
language-theoretical model of reflection of several idealist philosophers. Novalis,
for example, says:
The first signifier [he means the schematizing activity of sign founda-
tion] will have unnoticeably painted its own picture in front of the mir-
ror of reflection, and it will also not be forgotten that the picture is
painted in the position in which it paints itself.
6
Foucault says fundamentally the same thing when he asserts:
An idea can be the sign of another, not only because a bond of
representation can be established between them, but also because this
representation can always be represented within the idea that is
representing. Or again, because representation in its peculiar essence is
always perpendicular to itself: it is at the same time indication and ap-
pearance; a relation to an object and a manifestation of itself. (OT, 65)
Those who are familiar with neostructuralisnfs critique of the concept of the self-
representation of self-consciousness are certainly more than a little surprised to
see that Foucault takes over this concept, applied to the sign, without much ado.
The Order of Things, by the way, begins with a now-famous description of Las
meninas by Velasquez, a painting in which exactly what Foucault and Novalis de-
scribe takes place, namely, a painting-himself of the painter in the position in
which he paints himself; or, a representation of representation that even brings
into the picture the viewer of the painting, who finds himself in the position of
the one who is viewed, and which also represents the model by means of a reflec-
tion in a mirror (see also OT, 307-8).
Before one examines the possibility of such an implicit self-representation in
each reference to something, one has to ask oneself, of course, whether Foucault
justifiably cites this characteristic as a feature of the Enlightenment his book
makes, after all, a historicizing claim. In fact, Foucault worked out this historical
relation more clearly in his preface to the Grammaire gnral et raisonne of Ar-
nauld and Lancelot than in The Order of Things, There he asks himself why the
logic, but not the grammar, of Port Royal contains an explicit theory of the sign.
LHCTURE 8 123
His answer is that the generality of grammar cannot be derived from the in-
dividual usages of the speakers, not even from the average usage, and certainly
not from the side of the word: "General grammar traces particular usages back
to universally valid principles" ("Prface," ix-x).
The question is, "What instance guarantees this passage and how can one be
sure that, starting from a singular fact, one has indeed attained to an absolutely
general form?" (x). The answer is that the generality of correct speech (and thus
of grammar) is guaranteed by the unity of reason, which represents itself uni-
formly, if in changing signifiers, in all languages.
For the "reason" that traverses the singularity of the languages is not of
the order of the historical fact or the accident; it is of the order of what
men in general can want to say or mean (vouloir dire), (x)
The rules of correct thinking, however, are determined by logic; thus the theory
of signs is grounded in logic as well.
There is another thing to consider: while one can use the term "grammar*' to
designate both the immanent order of speech and the theory of this order, there
is no such duplication in logic. Logic is nothing but a reflection onto the uncon-
sciously obeyed rules of correct thinking.
In other words, logic, in relation to the natural art of thinking, is a light
that allows us to know ourselves and to be sure that we possess the
truth. . . . Its task is purely reflexive; it undertakes to explain only
when there is a matter of nontruth. Logic is the art of thinking enlight-
ening itself of itself and formulating itself into words, (xiv-xv)
If we take our first observation (namely, that the generality of grammar is
grounded in the general validity of logical thought) with the second (namely, that
the art of thinking is reflected in itself), we arrive exactly at Foucault's assertion
that every speech act has to once more represent its representing-something in
itself. For when I speak, I follow rules; if I want to know why I have to follow
precisely these rules in order to speak correctly, then I have to uncover the princi-
ples that found them. These founding principles, however, are formulated by
logic, and they are reflected in themselves.
Foucault also traces this in Enlightenment's concept of the sign (xviff.). The
sign (whose rules of usage are formulated by grammar) is, according to the
grammar of Port Royal, the representation of a thing for our mind. Foucault
paraphrases this definition as follows:
To give a sign to an idea is to give oneself an idea whose object will be
the representative of what constituted the object of the first idea; the ob-
ject of the sign will be substitutable for and equivalent to the idea of the
signified object, (xvii)
124 LJ LECTURE 8
This formula is not easily understood. It means this: to designate the idea (or
representation) that I have of a thing, I have to choose a second representation
(or idea), namely, the sign. This second idea the sign must have the same ob-
ject as the first in order to actually serve as the placeholder for the first (original)
one. In other words, its object (the object of the sign) must be the representative
of that object to which the idea of the mind refers. In this way the completely un-
folded sign is a four-part system that can be illustrated as follows:
Representation -> thing
I
Representation - thing
or again:
Idea - (object = idea - ) object (xviii)
In this schematization one can see more easily than in The Order of Things what,
according to Foucault, is the nature of this strange self-duplication of representa-
tion: "The relation of the idea to its sign is thus a specification or rather a doubling
of the idea to its object" (xviii). This reflexivity is nothing other than the inscrip-
tion of logic within grammar, i.e., the being-dominated of sign usage by the
reflexivity of thought that only externally represents itself in the sign usage,
which in itself, however, is immediately familiar with itselfby means of its
reflexivity: "word and meaning appear to be linked at a level that arises not from
grammar but from the speculativeness of thought translucent for itself (xix).
What Foucault tells us here closely follows the grammar or logic of Port Royal
(from the middle of the seventeenth century) and may be considered historically
valid, even if it brings to light only a partial aspect of the (early) "classical age."
It is also true that the concept of repraesentatio (German: Vorstellung, French
and English: /<i<?V/"idea") "is promoted to the status of organizing principle of the
theory of consciousness and of language, above all by Leibnitz and Wolff."
7
Birus
also confirms the correctness of Foucault's assertion that this term gained "more
and more a subjective-psychological signification" until the meaning of this place-
holding representation (Stellvertretung) (by a sign) finally disappeared behind the
meaning of the self-reflexivity of a (mental) representation (Vorstellung). "This
historical development of the term culminated in Kant's treatment of Vorstellung
in itself (repraesentatio) as the most general generic concept of theoretical
philosophy"
8
and in K. L. Reinhold's elevation of representation to the status of
the general principle of deduction of all philosophy: here the link between "classi-
cal knowledge" and philosophical idealism is touched upon. But already Leibnitz
had conceived representation as self-reflexive, as the phrase sibi repraesentare
proves.
9
LECTURE 8 D 125
Although Foucault can present historical data to support his thesis that the
representational model of language implies not only a dependence of speech on
thought but also a reflexivity of the representational procedures, one still has to
ask oneself whether a representation that is reflected in itself is indeed possible.
The question is all the more appropriate since Foucault does not clearly reject the
representational model in his melding of classical and structuralist thought. (On
the contrary, he considers historical criticism of it to be a "mere episode" in the
history of philology, which at present is in the process of being replaced by a "re-
turn of language.")
Now if a representation that is reflected in itself is possible, one could escape
the structurality of structure and we could, without further ado, return to the early
idealist model of consciousness in whichas in the early Fichte-the I not only
posits itself, but posits itself as self-positing.
10
In this case what is represented
would always already be disclosed in light of a previous consciousness that jumps
outside the play of designation. Foucault, in fact, says that language represents
thought in exactly the same way as thought presents itself ("Representing must
be understood in the strict sense: language represents thought as thought
represents itself; OT, 78). In other words, a sign that simultaneously also desig-
nates its being-a-sign dissolves the necessity for representation in favor of the im-
mediate self-presence of something present.
And language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself.
Words do not, then, form a thin film that duplicates thought on the out-
side; they recall thought, they indicate it, but inwards first of all,
among all those representations that represent other representations.
The language of the Classical age is much closer to the thought it is
charged with expressing than is generally supposed; but it is not parallel
to it; it is caught in the grid of thought, woven into the very fabric it is
unrolling. It is not an exterior effect of thought, but thought itself. (07,
78)
n
We can observe a strange turn in this paragraph that is characteristic of Foucaulfs
image of classicism: the first part of the passage emphasizes that language the
material aspect of languagedoes not hide thought, so to speak, behind the fa-
cade of the signifier; rather it grants it self-reflection as a form of self-presencing
precisely by means of the moving away from the represented thing that is in-
scribed in all representation. The second part of the passage describes this self-
reflection that suffuses the materiality and autonomy of the sign completely
in terms of Saussurean "articulation": as a being-interwoven of "thought" and
"sound" in the differential unity of the sign, and not as a mere "parallelism" of
signifier and signified. Nevertheless, the sign is only supposed to be the immedi-
ate manifestation of a thought that knows itself even without the sign. This ex-
126 C] LECTURE 8
plains why Foucault can understand Saussure's semiology as a return of the
representational model of the classical age.
We saw earlier that Fichte uncovered the circular logic in the conception of
an immediate being-familiar-with-itself of thought. Since 1800 the formula of to-
posit-itself-as-self-positing has been replaced by the formula of the "force with
an implanted eye." This formula seeks to take account of the fact that self-
consciousness cannot be held responsible a second time for this task of represen-
tation if it possesses an immediate representation of its self; only when the task
of representation occurs is there self-consciousness. In other words, the con-
sciousness of representation cannot simultaneously posit (or know) itself as the
ground of the task of representation to which it owes its self-consciousness. And
from this we infer that designation is prior to self-consciousness, a conclusion in
whose effective history we also located Foucault's "archaeology"at least until
we saw how it itself is caught up in the model of representation. From this Fran-
ois Wahl concludes that Foucault's "archaeology" in no way excludes the re-
course to a "transcendental subject," although it renders impossible any compati-
bility with the principles of neostructuralism.
12
At this point we do not want to make a final conclusion about the justifiability
of this strict judgment (which, we note, was made by a representative of neostruc-
turalism, not by one of its adversaries). Even if Foucault again and again most
obviously in his support of Saussure as a thinker who reestablished the Enlighten-
ment formation of thought-expressed his sympathy with a modified form of the
model of representation, he still never asserted that the evolution of modern
epistemes was completed within this model. On the contrary, he dedicated half
of his book to the dawn of a new discursive formation, which he discussed not
under the heading of Reprsenter, but rather under "The Age of History" (OT,
217fL). The paradigm of representation, which can fairly easily be dated between
1775 and 1825, is transformed by a paradigm that in Germany was called "histori-
cal consciousness" (OT, 221). Foucault believes that the blossoming of the human
sciences follows from it and is built on the foundation of its "historical a priori."
This "epistemological break" has shaken classical thought (which Foucault at
this time still broadly calls "discourse") to a greater extent than the thought of the
Renaissance was shaken by the classical age. Foucault probably did not exagger-
ate when he called the break with the model of representation and the dissolution
of the paradigm of order into that of history a fundamental event:
And it took a fundamental event-certainly one of the most radical that
ever occurred in Western cultureto bring about the dissolution of the
positivity of Classical knowledge, and to constitute another positivity
from which, even now, we have doubtless not entirely emerged. . . .
From this springs an almost infinite series of consequences. (220, 243)
LECTURE 8 127
Foucault carried out his analysis of the epistemological break under the view-
points of life (biology), production of value (economy), and production of mean-
ing (philology, linguistics). All these disciplines, he believes, depart from the tax-
onomical element in classical thought: from the classification of living things,
from the analysis of wealth, and from the universal regularities of general gram-
mar and hermeneutics; and they move toward a thinking that dynamizes these or-
dering disciplines. In biology the concept of organization and evolution appears;
analysis of wealth gives way to the reconstruction of its material production (from
Adam Smith through to Marx); and the grammatical and rhetorical systems ex-
pose a transcendental subject in their depth that originarily produces meaning and
uses it in different constellations differently according to its own interpretation.
The knowledge of philosophy appears under the auspices of the loss of an origin
that it seeks to retrieve in the future.
This rearranging of the historical a priori of (classical) "discourse" necessarily
and primarily destroys the concept of representation as well. It is relatively easy
to see why. The classical episteme is grounded in the assumption that a complete
dissolution of the signifier in the signified can be obtained; no property of the sign
opposes the thought that represents itself by means of the sign, especially not if
the order of thoughts is conceived as atemporal in its truth. For something is true,
according to classical thought, not because it can be felt, believed, or viewed as
true by me here and now, but rather because it simply cannot be felt, believed,
or viewed in any other way; what is true is a fortiori always true. This premise
is invalidated when time (or History: l'Histoire) intervenes or makes its nest in
the synthesis of representation. To be temporal means (among other things) not
to be simply present. A temporally mediated synthesis of signifier and signified
thus cannot simply be described as a relationship of representation. For to repre-
sent means to make a prior presence present again in the sign. If, however, the
object that the sign "represents" becomes a fact of a historical world, then the sign
assumes an index of temporality; i.e., the annotation that the semiological synthe-
sis accomplished by it could be undertaken differently and will be undertaken
differently by future generations. Words and things come into flux.
Obviously, History in this sense is not to be understood as the compila-
tion of factual successions or sequences as they may have occurred; it
is the fundamental mode of being of empiricities, upon the basis of
which they are affirmed, posited, arranged, and distributed in the space
of knowledge for the use of such disciplines or sciences as may
arise. . . . History, as we know, is certainly the most erudite, the
most aware, the most conscious, and possibly the most cluttered area of
our memory. {OT, 219)
If one calls thinking in taxonomical orders "metaphysical," then, Foucault main-
tains, one could go as far as to say that "historical consciousness" overcomes old
128 U LECTURE 8
metaphysics in the same manner as Kant's criticism of metaphysics and Hegel's
logical sublation of metaphysics (OT, 219, 242-43). (I emphasize this statement
by Foucault because it again brings his "archaeology" into noticeable contrast
with Derrida's "deconstruction," which, judging from Foucault's perspective, is
merely a later event in the course of the evolution of historical-hermeneutical con-
sciousness, whereas Derrida declares even historicism and hermeneutics to be
metaphysical, to the extent that they cling to some form of self-relation, and that
simply of a temporal-historical sort.)
Be that as it may, historical consciousness introduces with the nonidentity of
the temporal-something obscure into the transparency of the relation of
representation: "an element that cannot be reduced to that representation" (OT,
237). Within the analysis of wealth it is productive labor (le travail) that leaves
the dark stain. Within the domain o histoire naturelle it is organization; in the
sphere of language it is the inflectional system (le systme flexionnel).
From this event onward, what gives value to the objects of desire is not
solely the other objects that desire can represent to itself, but an ele-
ment that cannot be reduced to that representation: labour, what makes
it possible to characterize a natural being is no longer the elements that
we can analyse in the representations we make for ourselves of it and
other beings, it is a certain relation within this being, which we call its
organic structure; what makes it possible to define a language is not the
way in which it represents representations, but a certain internal ar-
chitecture, a certain manner of modifying the words themselves in ac-
cordance with the grammatical position they take up in relation to one
another: in other words, its inflectional system. In all these cases, the
relation of representation to itself, and the relations of order it becomes
possible to determine apart from all quantitative forms of measurement,
now pass through conditions exterior to the actuality of the representa-
tion itself. (237)
What exactly is the nature of these external conditions that obscure the trans-
parency of representation? They can probably best be understood through a com-
parison: In the Enlightenment (savoir classique) the individual signs and the sign
chains were considered marks of elementary ideas or of connections of ideas, and
they derived their evidence from this recourse to reason. The world of words and
the world of things or ideas were one and the same; their referentiality was
preestablished. This is no longer the case when reason is viewed as a historical
institution that, while following rules, by no means follows rules that are valid
for all time.
What does that mean, "to follow rules that are not valid for all time?" Appar-
ently, it means that the elements of the order of reason are not equipped from the
beginning with a signification that guarantees their reference to the world.
13
Pre-
cisely this was presupposed by classical thought, and precisely this explained the
LECTURE 8 U 129
transparency of the signs to the ideas whose signs they were. However, if the rela-
tion of ideas to their objects is not previously defined (and "preestablished" means
nothing other than this), then the medium that puts ideas and things in a relation
acquires a certain autonomy; and this medium is language, taken as a system of
relations or as a schematism. A schema is a rule that indicates how reason has
to proceed in order to furnish its categories and concepts with signification and
thus with a reference to an object. For in contrast to what the Enlightenment
thought about language, ideas are not naturally represented by signs; this occurs
only when a schematism i.e., a languagebecomes a mediator. Once a lan-
guageand thus a certain intersubjectively accepted manner of interpreting the
world is constituted, then there are indeed also rules of reason; however, these
rules can no longer be segregated from the concept of a linguistic interpretation
and schematization of the world. One could phrase this in Herder's terminology
as follows: neither the world (as the sum of objective facts) nor reason (as the
system of ideas) is an originary entity; prior to both is the process of synthesis
that can be carried out very differently at different times in the evolution of hu-
mankind. Reason and the language that represents it are thus literally
institutions of a synthetic activity, such as imagination, as expressed in particu-
larly drastic fashion by Herder.
Our reason is formed only through fictions. We incessantly seek and
create for ourselves a One in the Manifold and give it a form; out of
this arise concepts, ideas, ideals.
14
This formulation opens up a series of insights into the theory of language of the
nineteenth century, at the end of which stands Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and
Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense."
15
If truth, according to Nietzsche, understood
as the correspondence of thought and reality, is itself only an institution of (some-
thing instituted by) language and thus by imagination, then one cannot control
speech by means of a truth criterion that is independent of language. On the con-
trary, the concepts of a language and its syntax are nothing other than
a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short
a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically in-
tensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a na-
tion fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has
forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have be-
come powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse
effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as
metal.
16
I hope that you can see the point of this interpretation of language, which - despite
the many contemporary approaches in linguistics that rely on classical thought,
be it "Cartesian linguistics" or taxonomical linguistics-is basically still our own.
130 'J LECTURE 8
It states that the rules of reason, on whose timeless validity the Enlightenment un-
critically relied, are the precipitates of synthetic activities behind which, in the
final analysis, there is a "transcendental," vital, or laboring subject that founds
value and meaning and that simply institutes the circulating signs or life functions
or commodities into their respective order and to this extent is not part of this or-
der itself. The founding subject is always one that falls through the mesh of struc-
ture: in relation to being it is something that is relatively non-being:
The very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside
representation itself.
It is the activity that has produced them [objects, other symbolic
orders] and has silently lodged itself within them. (OT, 240, 238)
These, then, are the two characteristics of the founding activity: it founds the or-
der of representations, and it escapes this order. Whatever sees to it that some-
thing else enters into a certain order is not a member of this order itself. One of
the significations of "transcendental" means exactly this: the condition of possibil-
ity for the mode of Being of something other, but not itself falling under the mode
of Being of what is founded. Hermeneutics will become the central discipline that
tracks down the constituting activity of an organizing subjectivity in the back-
ground of (nineteenth-century) orders; this subjectivity presents itself, according
to the domain from which it at any given time draws its object, as the force of
life ("will to life," "will to power"), as the force of production ("value-producing
labor"), or as linguistic enrgeia, i.e., as the capacity of creating signs and alter-
ing meaning. In each case and in each of these domains it is the ground for the
unity and unitedness of the field, and thus for its systematic nature (if we define
"system" as a coexistence of many in the unity of one central concern).
The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation,
beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world
even deeper and more dense than representation itself. {OT, 239)
You may have noted that Foucault characterizes the value- and meaning-
producing activity as "synthetic," whereas he calls the classical episteme "ana-
lytic" (07, 243ff.), for example, in the preceding quotation, where he (indirectly)
calls it the "condition of these links" that allows the representations to become
members of one unified order. Insofar as this is the case, one can also describe
the transition from the Enlightenment to postromantic modernism as a transition
from the paradigm of analytic reason to that of synthetic reason.
17
Historical con-
sciousness indeed asserts that analysis would literally have nothing to analyze
(i.e., dismantle and differentiate), if previously something had not been put to-
gether by a synthetic act. For Kant the pure concepts of understanding {Verstan-
desbegriffe) (whose application, for their part, lends unity to all concepts of ex-
perience [Erfahrungsbegrijfe]) are grounded in an overriding synthetic act that
LECTURE 8 D 131
he calls the transcendental synthesis of self-consciousness (or of apperception).
In the same way, all moral (sittliche) actions are grounded in a pure desire that
vouches for their unity. And even aesthetic or teleological judgments derive their
unity on the basis of an anticipation of a pure purpose of reason that founds them.
From this, there springs an almost infinite series of consequences of
unlimited consequences, at least, since our thought today still belongs to
the same dynasty. In the first rank, we must undoubtedly place the
simultaneous emergence of a transcendental theme and new empirical
fields or, if not new, at least distributed and founded in a new way.
(243)
This schism between what in a narrow sense is the transcendental-philosophical
realm and the empirical domain seems to be connected to the schism between the
analytic and the synthetic. In the next lecture we want to investigate what the con-
sequences are of this schism and to what extent it shapes the image of the human
sciences.
Lecture 9
If in the previous lecture we informed ourselves particularly thoroughly about
what Foucault contributes to the theory of representation in the Enlightenment,
this was because we saw that he expressed certain sympathies with this model.
From the standpoint of this model he developscontrastively in The Order of
Things the genesis of the human sciences, which he calls a mere "episode" in
the course of modern thought. Well, an "episode" is an incident, something that
suddenly occurs and then disappears. If one designates the dawn of historical con-
sciousness, which breaks with the model of representation, a mere episode within
the flow of Western thought, then one pays all the more attention to the immedi-
ately prior, namely, the classical form of knowledge. A simple return to classical
discourse is out of the question, of course.
1
Even to consider this possibility
would be naive, Foucault admits. He adds, however, that this return would be
"all the more tempting, it must be said, because we are so ill-equipped to conceive
of the shining but crude being of language, whereas the old theory of representa-
tion is there, already constituted, offering us a place in which that being can be
lodged and allowed to dissolve into pure function" (OT, 338-39). Thus it is proba-
bly more than mere sympathy that causes Foucault to dream of Saussure's semiol-
ogy, of Nietzsche's thought, of Mallarm's absolute literature, and of other
phenomena as the return of language (383-84). The model of representation
seems to serve Foucault as the orientational framework for his critique of
modernism's image of the world under the conditions of the insufficiency of a
postmodern or "still unknown thought." One could almost maintain that the tenor
132
Lt Cl UKH y U {53
of his critique of modernism does not so much bear the mark of neostructuralism
as it bears that of the Enlightenment (as he sees it).
All the more reason why we are interested in discovering how Foucault ex-
plains historical consciousness, and at which points he considers it incompatible
with the model of representation. The previous lecture has already provided us
with some pieces of information in this regard. The most important was that the
model of representation presupposes a prcestablished relation between thought
and the sign that represents it, and, on top of this, it must be conscious of the
representativity of this relation. To designate ideas always simultaneously means
knowing that the signs are mere signs. It is precisely this transparency of the rela-
tion "thought"/"sign" that is clouded if one conceives it as something that was im-
planted, as something that has to be established either by a transcendental or by
a historical force which produces the relation between the sign and the signified
from the outset and which can no longer be controlled by a timeless-universal rea-
son. It is not as if there would no longer be rules for speech; it is not even ques-
tioned that these rules are at the same time rules of reason. What is new is that
the rules of reason, or of language, are grounded in synthetic acts that precede
analysis and remain exterior to it. Analysis would have nothing to sink its teeth
into if synthesis had not previously produced something. The dependence of anal-
ysis on synthesis, however, clouds the transparency of the relation of depiction
that is articulated in analysis; it obscures the bond between language and
representation.
Foucault believes that an almost infinite number of consequences arise from
this transformation of the classical episteme (OT, 243). The most important of
these is the simultaneous surfacing of the transcendental theme and of new empir-
ical fields. This splitting off of what, in a narrower sense, is transcendental-
philosophical from the issue of empiricism seems to be connected with the schism
between the synthetic and the analytic. Formerly, Foucault says, there was only
one general science of order ^mathesis as a general science of order"; 243); its
field of application embraced not only a priori knowledge (for example, mathe-
matical knowledge) but also empirical knowledge. These two domains of knowl-
edge now fall apart. On the one side there is transcendental philosophy, which
founds the conditions of possibility of knowledge (Erkenntnis) and explains them
on the basis of the performance of a subject that itself is nonempirical (243). On
the other side there is a type of thinking that "questions the conditions of a relation
between representations from the point of view of the being itself that is repre-
sented: what is indicated, on the horizon of all actual representations, as the foun-
dation of their unity" (244). Although even the principles that found the unity of
the being that is represented by knowledge are never objectifiable as such (other-
wise they would not be principles), they are, in contrast to the subject of transcen-
dental philosophy, nonetheless objective principles, as it were, since they found
the concrete context for the world of experience. Foucault calls them "transcen-
134 LECTURE 9
dentals" {transcendantaux), and as illustrations he mentions "the force of labour,
the energy of life, the power of speech" (244).
In their being, they are outside knowledge, but by that very fact they
are conditions of knowledge; they correspond to Kant's discovery of a
transcendental field and yet they differ from it in two essential points:
they are situated with the object, and, in a way, beyond it. (244)
They thus stand on the side of the objects, for they found the context for the con-
crete realm of experience; they accomplish this foundation of coherence, how-
ever, on the basis of a principle that itself is not objective: a regulating idea of
the realm of experience, as Kant calls it in his transcendental dialectics. This idea
of Kant concerns not the a priori truths but rather the a posteriori (and thus empiri-
cal) truths (or syntheses). In this schism between empirical and purely a priori
syntheses Foucault recognizes the germ for that schism of intellectual disciplines
so characteristic for the nineteenth century: the schism between disciplines
oriented toward the methodological ideal of mathematics, and disciplines that,
like the Geisteswissenschaften, bring an impenetrable synthetic activity into play
that is not subject to this ideal of exactitude. One side of this schism, the dis-
ciplines of the transcendantaux, splits itself further, according to Foucault, into
metaphysics and positivism. The metaphysical systems (for example, those of
German idealism) seem in a certain sense precritical, for they again dare to pres-
ent a great systematic explanation of the world (even of the concrete-empirical
world) on the basis of one idea; positivism, on the other hand, refrains from any
recourse to a founding ground that explains the rationality of the realm of ex-
perience.
Thus, on the basis of criticism or rather on the basis of this displace-
ment of being in relation to representation, of which Kantian doctrine is
the first philosophical statementa fundamental correlation is estab-
lished: on the one hand there are metaphysics of the object, or, more
exactly, metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which ob-
jects rise up towards our superficial knowledge; and, on the other hand,
there are philosophies that set themselves no other task than the obser-
vation of precisely that which is given to positive knowledge. (245)
But despite their manifest inimicality to each other, Foucault believes that the dis-
ciplines of the "transcendentals"i.e., of objective syntheses are epistemologi-
cally connected in their common incompatibility with the demand of the analytical
sciences (of the purely a priori, the formal-deductive sciences, namely, logic and
mathematics).
The analytic disciplines are found to be epistemologically distinct from
those that are bound to make use of synthesis. . . . In this double
affirmation alternating or simultaneousof being able and not being
LECTURE 9 D 135
able to formalize the empirical, perhaps we should recognize the
ground-plan of that profound event which, towards the end of the eight-
eenth century, detached the possibility of synthesis from the space of
representations. It is this event that places formalization, or mathematic-
ization, at the very heart of any modern scientific project; it is this
event, too, that explains why all hasty mathematicization or naive for-
malization of the empirical seems like "pre-critical" dogmatism and a
return to the platitudes of Ideology. (246)
Here we recall an observation expressed in particularly impressive fashion in
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: the decay of the classical episteme is the
decay of the axiom of universality or of a general metalanguage. The general
metalanguage was supposed to guarantee the unity of the individual language
games into which our social and cultural context, as well as our life-world, is
divided. This metadiscourse, which overrides and unifies all individual dis-
courses, would be universal in the original sense of the word: it would be a unum
versum, a One that has been turned into a manifold, the consistent unity of a Mani-
fold, i.e., a totality (unity in the manifold is universality). With the decline of
what in France was called "ideology," on the one hand, and of German idealism,
on the other, this postulate of universality became theoretically and practically
untenable as something that is founded a priori.
This is also Foucault's opinion, but, in contrast to Lyotard, he regrets this rup-
ture, and he is inclined to belittle it as a mere "episode" and fight it polemically.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the unity of the mathesis
was fractured. Doubly fractured: first, along the line dividing the pure
forms of analysis from the laws of synthesis, second, along the line that
separates, when it is a matter of establishing syntheses, transcendental
subjectivity and the mode of being of objects. (OT, 247)
At the time of Descartes and Leibnitz "the reciprocal transparency of knowledge
and philosophy was absolute" (247). With Kant these two forms of knowledge are
divided: from now on they are no longer held together by the same unifying prin-
ciple. What now became problematical - since it could not be arbitrated through
the unity of a common principle-was the rivalry between formal and transcen-
dental claims for knowledge on the one hand, and that between the domain of em-
piricities and their transcendental foundation on the other. Foucault concludes his
observations about the break of the nineteenth century with the Enlightenment
model of representation with the following summary:
The most distant consequencesand the most difficult ones for us to
evadeof the fundamental event that occurred in the Western episteme
towards the end of the eighteenth century may be summed up as fol-
lows: negatively, the domain of the pure forms of knowledge becomes
isolated, attaining both autonomy and sovereignty in relation to all em-
136 G LECTURE 9
pirical knowledge, causing the endless birth and rebirth of a project to
formalize the concrete and to constitute, in spite of everything, pure
sciences; positively, the empirical domains become linked with reflec-
tions on subjectivity, the human being, and finitude, assuming the value
and function of philosophy, as well as of the reduction of philosophy or
counterphilosophy. (248-49)
At this point we, for the first time, come across the clearly expressed second
worry of Foucault. When representation becomes opaque there evolves a com-
pletely new interest in the human subject: the human being, according to Fou-
cault, is, strictly speaking, an invention of romanticism (at the turn of the eight-
eenth to the nineteenth century), an invention completely foreign to (classical)
discourse and that one day will again disappear, like a facial impression in the
sand on the seashore.
Before I present the evidence that Foucault cites for his thesis, I want to inter-
rupt my report by expressing a doubt. We saw that Foucault conceives the figure
of self-reflection to be inscribed in classical thought. He demonstrated with clever
and instructive interpretations that the figure of representationstat aliquid pro
aiiquoimplies an immanent duplication of referentiality: the idea stands for an
object, but not directly, rather it stands for it by letting itself be represented by
another idea (the sign), whose object becomes the placeholder of that which con-
stituted the object of the first idea (see the "Prface" to the Grammaire gnrale
et raisonne of Arnauld and Lancelot, xvii). In this way each sign reference is
once again embedded or contained in itself: it is always simultaneously conscious
of itself as something mediated through signs. Furthermore, we saw that this
reflexivity that is inscribed in the sign reference brought with it in the course of
the Enlightenment an ever-stronger subjectification/psychologization of the term
"representation." Initially conceived as linguistic representation (in the sense of
"to present, represent, or express something"), reprsentation in the end becomes
reprsentation in the sense of the Kantian term Vorstellung: the significative
representation (Vertretung) disappears behind the "self-reflexive relation onto the
subject of representing (Vorstellung)."
2
This subject of representing (Vorstellen),
in the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte at the very latest, stakes its claims
as the principle of representing {Vorstellen): other than in Kant and Reinhold, "the
4
theory of the capacity for representation' is now transposed into a theory of sub-
jectivity."
3
Hendrik Birus draws from this the following conclusion:
Foucault [gives] no convincing proof for his (more Hegelian than "Clas-
sical") thesis of a force specific to representation for representing itself,
this "folding of representation back upon itself having materialized into
something like "the human being" as the theme of anthropology only at
the end of the eighteenth century (cf. Foucault, MC, esp. 78ff., 85, 92,
319fT.). In contrast to this, Foucault's (at this point, however, sup-
LECTURE 9 D 137
pressed) main authority, Heidegger, emphasizes justifiably the immedi-
ate interrelationship between the rise of representatio as "Vor-stellung"
since Descartes, and the representing human being as the "setting, in
which the existent must from now on represent itself, that is, be a view
or picture/'
4
In short, the development of classical German (and European) philosophy of the
subject took place gradually, and not, as Foucault would have it, in the form of
a (discontinuous) rupture out of classical philosophy of representation and its idea
about the self-reflexivity of representation.
5
Without such a deep continuity of the
sort Heidegger and Derrida always emphasized, even Foucault's harmonizing
conception of a "destiny of Western philosophy" (OT, 248) would remain unintel-
ligible; for what could destiny possibly be if not the unity of an inescapable fate
that was gradually executed throughout history: namely, an all-Western interpre-
tation of Being in the sense of presence or disposability-an interpretation that
is only fatalistic insofar as it is not based on a wanton act as whose authors the
subjects would see themselves?
At this point I discover a decisive weakness in the theoretical foundation that
has to support The Order of Things. On the one hand, Foucault has to insist on
the unfathomable discontinuity of epochs, since the alternative would be con-
tinuity, i.e., the stability of a One that would basically remain the same through
all transformations. In the final analysis, such a One could only be thought of as
a subject. To conceive a subject of history, however, would mean to betray the
concept of "archaeology," i.e., its initial fundamental insight. Foucault thus ends
up in the conflict of, on the one hand, having bluntly to reject the modern, i.e.,
postclassical episteme and, on the other hand, having to do this by means of the
model of representation thathowever unconsciously or unintentionally-carries
in itself the model of a self-reflecting subject of representations (reprsentations)
as an immanent consequence, and which openly brings it to light by the end of
the eighteenth century. The herewith admitted continuity between the phase of
the Enlightenment and that of postromanticism, however, would make it difficult
to talk about an epistemological break between the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, and would indicate that it is more a matter of a mere change in empha-
sis. In regard to Foucault's point of departurenamely, that a subject is out of
the question as the source of the historical process since it achieves self-
consciousness only in an already encoded world (remember the concept of the
"implanted gaze" [regard dj cod])precisely this thesis has an unwilling
similarity to knowledge in the nineteenth century. First of all, because it was the
nineteenth century that questioned the self-authorization of the subject (it was
Fichte who introduced the concept of the "implanted gaze"); second, because the
nineteenth century, as Foucault himself convincingly demonstrated, works with
deep structures as an explanatory model, i.e., with structures that, although un-
138 H LECTURE 9
conscious themselves, determine our thinking, acting, and feeling from a deeper
level. With this, knowledge's own foundation is obscured: history loses its unity
and continuity. Surprisingly, Foucault regrets precisely this feature, "that from
the nineteenth century the field of knowledge can no longer provide the ground
for a reflection that will be homogeneous and uniform at all points" (OT, 279).
To express it paradoxically and strikingly: Foucault's model of archaeological
orders in whose net a knowledge is formed that for the first time mediates between
subject and object ("knowledge itself as an anterior and indivisible mode of being
between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge"; 252) so resembles the
models that he calls "transcendentals" and that he takes to be the characteristic
forms of organization of knowledge in the much hated nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, that it could be mistaken for one of them. It is a question of synthetic
principles, as we saw, which operate from a deeper level like the forces of a mag-
net that arranges iron chips on a piece of paper into a structured order. Thus also
the structured orders of which the eighteenth century was conscious become
secondary effects of an energy that is untransparently operating beneath the sur-
face and whose depth cannot be fathomed by any reflection: something that in the
literal sense of the word is irrepresentable (OT, 251), which ipso facto will be
historical because it will produce an infinite number of finite forms none of which
will be an adequate expression of the principle, so that the chain of productions
will continue on indefinitely.
In the realm of economic facts the acts of exchange that are noticeable on the
surface disappear (but not those that initiate the circulation of wealth); they are
now explained as practical-inert reflexes of a force that can never be brought to
the surface and that since Adam Smith and Ricardo is referred to as the productive
force (Produktivkraft) of labor. Marx will add that it is a question of the discovery
of a commodity "whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a
source of value, whose actual compensation, therefore, is itself an embodiment
of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value."
6
This general condition of pos-
sibility of wealth in fact corresponds, in the realm of the empirical, to what Kant
called "transcendental" in the realm of pure acts of consciousness; thus Marx oc-
casionally speaks of the "seemingly transcendental power" of objectified labor.
7
Similarly, the hitherto mechanically-analytically explained facts of natural his-
tory (histoire naturelle) do not disappear from the scientific consciousness of the
nineteenth century: now they are deduced, however, from a deep force; namely,
from life (vie) as a teleological and synthesizing principle on the basis of which
the objectified manifestations can ultimately be grasped, while the deep force it-
self escapes knowledge. The animated world is, as the title of Schopenhauer's
principal work indicates, only seemingly "representation"; in reality, however,
it is primordial will that is prior to all representing and that founds it.
8
The actual
moving force is, as Foucault demonstrates nicely with the example of the com-
parative anatomy of Cuvier, the "internal organic structure of living beings" (OT,
LECTURE 9 139
252): the principle of production that is common to all species. At the center of
the life sciences stands the concept of the organ, defined since Kant as the point
of intersection of two types of causality: a mechanical cause, which also rules in
the domain of inorganic beings, and a finalistic one. Under a final cause Kant un-
derstands a purpose that lies in the future, toward which the entire chain of or-
ganic production is directed in such a way that the purpose has to be regarded
as the cause of the mechanical relation of cause and effect. Even without this
speculative cloaking, this idea governs biology in the nineteenth century, for ex-
ample, in the distinction between structure and function of an organ. With Cuvier
the functionalist perspective (which replaces Kant's finalist viewpoint) gains the
upper hand and forces the structural-descriptive standpoint more and more into
the background. The analytically identifiable blueprints no longer form a feature
for classification; rather, living beings are sorted according to the principle of
identity, analogy, or inner dependency of their life functions.
Life is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less cer-
tain fashion from the mechanical; it is that in which all the possible dis-
tinctions between living beings have their basis. It is this transition
from the taxonomic to the synthetic notion of life which is indicated, in
the chronology of ideas and sciences, by the recrudescence, in the early
nineteenth century, of vitalist themes. From the archaeological point of
view, what is being established at this particular moment is the condi-
tions of possibility of a biology. (269)
Finally the third "transcendental" is languagethe taxonomy of language
does not disappear from the consciousness of linguistics in the transition from the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century; it is now, however, explainedas in eco-
nomics and biology as a secondary effect of a dynamic force of language: as
enrgeia, not as ergon (if we let Humboldt's classical distinction jump in as a
placeholder). Foucault follows this process from Friedrich Schlegefs "Essay on
the Language and Philosophy of the Indians" (1808), through Jacob Grimm's
Deutsche Grammatik (1818), to Bopp's Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit,
Greek, Latin and Teutonic Languages, Shewing the Original Identity of Their
Grammatical Structure (1816). One discovers the "inner form" of the national
languages, the respectively different articulation of "world" in the linguistic image
of a culture, and grammar as an organic system;
9
but even the relationship among
languages is discovered, this time no longer to the extent that they are arbitrary
representations of one reason that is common to all humankind, but rather to the
extent that they have a common historical origin: the primordial Indo-European
language, for example. This is demonstrated by etymological laws of derivation
and laws of linguistic transformation (laws of modification of vowels, series of
graded vowels, etc.) that enable one to describe every existing national language
as a regulated variation of one primordial language. However, the reference to
140 LECTURE 9
the common primordial language no longer redeems the national languages, as
it still did in the Enlightenment, from their irreducible individuality; the compari-
son remains "lateral because the comparison does not reach back to the elements
shared by all languages or to the representative stock upon which they draw; it
is therefore not possible to relate a language to the form or the principles that ren-
der all other languages possible" {OT, 291).
It is apparent, then, that historicity was introduced into the domain of
languages in the same way as into that of living beings. For an
evolution-other than one that is solely the traversal of ontological
continuities-to be conceived, the smooth unbroken pian of natural his-
tory had to be broken, the discontinuity of the sub-kingdoms had to re-
veal the plans of organic structure in all their diversity and without any
intermediary, organisms had to be ordered in accordance with the func-
tional arrangements they were to perform, and thus establish the rela-
tions of the living being with what enables it to exist. In the same way,
for the history of languages to be conceived, they had to be detached
from the broad chronological continuity that had linked them without
interruption as far back as their origin; they also had to be freed from
the common expanse of representations in which they were caught; by
means of this double break, the heterogeneity of the various grammati-
cal systems emerged with its peculiar patternings, the laws prescribing
change within each one, and the paths fixing possible lines of develop-
ment. (292-93)
The scrutiny of the
u
transcendentals"-"life, labor, language"-leaves us with
a division that is virtually impossible to remove. On the one hand, we know that
Foucault strictly rejects as an idealistic premise a subject that adequately
represents/reflects itself in its activities; the gaze of the archaeologist is the regard
dj cod. On the other hand, Foucault blames the historical disciplines of the
nineteenth century for distorting the adequate representation of meaning in ex-
pression by historicizing the synthesis of the sign; in this context he dreams of
a "return of language" and welcomes the first rays of light of a returning age of
representation in Saussure, Nietzsche, and Mallarm.
This immanent contradiction in Foucault's conception is so stunning that I have
to support it with additional evidence. In fact, he reproaches historical grammar
with frustrating absolute self-recognition and transparency of the recognizing
spirit, in contrast to general grammar, which guaranteed precisely this possibility.
The preeminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the
same time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is
no longer to come as close as possible to knowledge itself; it is merely
to apply the methods of understanding in general to a particular domain
of objectivity. (OT, 296)
LECTURE 9 141
According to Foucault, this development was effected by the dissociation of the
Enlightenment ideal of a universal science {mathesis universalis)', from now on
languages no longer represent a priori forms; formalization and interpretation fall
apart ("Interpretation and formalization have become the two great forms of anal-
ysis of our time"; 299). This means that "discourse" no longer, as before, is im-
mediately capable of truth on the basis of its participation in the logic inscribed
within it: truth and method now fall apart. On the one side there are linguistic
images of the world; they are systematically composed and form the a priori of
what can be said and thought ("The grammatical arrangements of a language are
the a priori of what can be expressed in it. The truth of discourse is caught in the
trap of philology"; 297). On the other side there is the trend toward formalization
and toward analysis that culminates in logistics, Russellian and language-analytic
philosophy, or in logical empiricism; this trend aims at the control of speech by
means of rules that themselves are not produced from linguistic traditions and
which to that extent are "objective."
The former trend the hermeneutical Foucault identifies with several names:
Schleiermacher, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (78, 298). According to him, they all
are looking for a hidden depth of meaning or of actions beneath the surface of
a text with the knowledge of which the constellation of the surface could only first
be understood, although this depth-like Freud's unconscious does not even ap-
pear on it. The trend toward formalization Foucault supports only with the (mis-
spelled) name "Russel" (corrected in OT, 299). What is original is that he con-
siders both trends to be sad results of one and the same epistemological shock,
namely, the breaking apart of the model of representation. While from now on
hermeneutics yearns for rules and justifications for a successful formalization,
logical atomism is desperately looking for an empirical field to which its rules can
be assigned. Pure thought and world are estranged from one another. Therefore,
Foucault concludes, it is not surprising that both-interpretation and formaliza-
tionfrequently seek to connect with one another, for example, in different
fashions in structuralism and in phenomenology (299). Both trends, however, the
search for sens as well as for signifiant, are two sides of the same coin.
It is true that the division between interpretation and formalization
presses upon us and dominates us today. But it is not rigorous enough:
the fork it forms has not been driven far enough down into our culture,
its two branches are too contemporaneous for us to be able to say even
that it is prescribing a simple option or that it is inviting us to choose
between the past, which believed in meaning, and the present (the fu-
ture), which has discovered the significant. In fact, it is a matter of two
correlative techniques whose common ground of possibility is formed
by the being of language, as it was constituted on the threshold of the
modern age. The critical elevation of language, which was a compensa-
tion for its subsidence within the object, implied that it had been
142 LI LECTURE 9
brought nearer both to an act of knowing, pure of all words, and to the
unconscious element in our discourse. It had to be either made transpar-
ent to the forms of knowledge, or thrust down into the contents of the
unconscious. This certainly explains the nineteenth century's double ad-
vance, on the one hand towards formalism in thought and on the other
towards the discovery of the unconscious towards Russell and Freud.
It also explains the tendency of one to move towards the other, and of
these two directions to cross: the attempt, for example, to discover the
pure forms that are imposed upon our unconscious before all content;
or again, the endeavour to raise the ground of experience, the sense of
being, the lived horizon of all our knowledge to the level of our dis-
course. It is here that structuralism and phenomenology find, together
with the arrangements proper to them, the general space that defines
their common ground. (299)
There is, Foucault adds, a third possibility of self-presentation of the new para-
digm of language: this is romantic-symbolist poetry (300). Only since its exis-
tence is there "la littrature": it embodies the harshest break with classical knowl-
edge because it points to itself instead of pointing to things, because it becomes
radically intransitive and self-reflexive. While it is apparently the opponent of
philology, in reality its obstinate silence is only philology's obverse side {figure
jumelle): the autonomous expression of the refusal to represent world or ideas,
i.e., to communicate.
At the moment when language, as spoken and scattered words, becomes
an object of knowledge, we see it reappearing in a strictly opposite mo-
dality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a
piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor,
where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the
brightness of its being. (300)
A strange constellation: analytical philosophy, hermeneutics, structuralism,
phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and absolute literature. They all, according to
Foucault, spring up on the same archaeological ground: namely, the nineteenth-
century conception of language, reworked and revolutionized by historical con-
sciousness. A stronger contrast to Derrida, who finds a completely new discourse
initiated with Mallarm, Nietzsche, and Freud, can hardly be conceived. For
Foucault these figures are typical exponents of the nineteenth century, and the "re-
turn of language" can occur only after the paradigm embodied in them has ex-
hausted itself. Even a key concept, which Derrida holds up against the harmoniz-
ing gesture of the nineteenth-century conception of language, namely, la
dissmination, the systematic uncontrollability of effects of meaning, the dissemi-
nation of meaning, is converted by Foucault into a feature of precisely this
nineteenth-century conception of language.
LECTURE 9 D 143
Once detached from representation, language has existed, right up to
our own day, only in a dispersed way: for philologists, words are like
so many objects formed and deposited by history; for those who wish
to achieve a formalization, language must strip itself of its concrete
content and leave nothing visible but those forms of discourse that are
universally valid; if one's intent is to interpret, then words become a
text to be broken down, so as to allow that other meaning hidden in
them to emerge and become clearly visible; lastly, language may some-
times arise for its own sake in an act of writing that designates nothing
other than itself. This dispersion imposes upon language, if not a privi-
leged position, at least a destiny that seems singular when compared
with that of labour or of life. When the table of natural history was dis-
sociated, the living beings within it were not dispersed, but, on the con-
trary, regrouped around the central enigma of life; when the analysis of
wealth had disappeared, all economic processes were regrouped around
the central fact of production and all that rendered it possible; on the
other hand, when the unity of general grammardiscourse was broken
up, language appeared in a multiplicity of modes of being, whose unity
was probably irrecoverable. It is for this reason, perhaps, that philo-
sophical reflection for so long held itself aloof from language. (304)
I cite this passage so extensively because even this aspect of Foucault's analysis
is astonishing. In the texts of Derrida or Deleuze there begins with Mallarm and
Nietzsche a counter movement against the ruling stream of the idea of a sign's
mode of Being that is oriented on the paradigm of reflection and interpretation.
For Foucault, however, the connection of philosophy to the so-called linguistic
turn is simply the executing of an imperative inscribed in the human sciences: to
render the Being of language independent of the demand of a world that exists
unto itself. For Foucault, Nietzsche and Mallarm are not the surpassers but
rather the culmination of hermeneutics, if only because he dismisses them in one
big sweep with all the human sciences. In this he is consistent: the fragmentation
of language, its liberation from the referent, its irreducibility to a truth value, its
historicization, its self-empowerment, etc., are all simply consequences of the
break with the model of representation of the classical age.
These questions were made possible by the fact that, at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the law of discourse having been detached from
representation, the being of language itself became, as it were, frag-
mented; but they became inevitable when, with Nietzsche, and Mal-
larm, thought was brought back, and violently so, towards language it-
self, towards its unique and difficult being. The whole curiosity of our
thought now resides in the question: What is language, how can we find
a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude?
(306)
144 a LECTURE 9
On the one hand, Foucault continues, the "transcendental" language shares this
alleged special position with the "transcendentals" life and labor. On the other
hand, the dawn of a new kind of thought pattern seems to be indicated in the
becoming-theme of language, and the thinking of the archaeologist belongs to this
new age: a thinking from beyond the grammer on the basis of which the West
until now has formed its discourse.
Is it a sign of the approaching birth, or, even less than that, of the very
first glow, low in the sky, of a day scarcely even heralded as yet, but
in which we can already divine that thoughtthe thought that has been
speaking for thousands of years without knowing what speaking is or
even that it is speaking is about to re-apprehend itself in its entirety,
and to illumine itself once more in the lightning flash of being? (306)
Note again the strange division in Foucault's argument: in order to be able to
speak at all of all-Western thought, one has to conceive its grammar as a continual
and goal-directed unity, completely in the sense of the nineteenth century. At this
point the dramatization of epochal ruptures that explode the relations of continuity
between epochs becomes superfluous. But even if that were possible, if the West
could demonstrate to the gaze of the archaeologist that its discourse is a unity,
then archaeology, which guarantees this unity, would not be an undertaking in
any way distinguishable from Hegel's self-consciousness of history. At the con-
clusion of Western spirituality, this spirit would understand itself in retrospect
as what it always was: through recognition it would liberate itself from the thus
far unconsciously forcing laws of its thought and would make room for a new
phase of thought. A new clearing of Being would dawn, a new flash, in which
meaning is disclosed, would inundate us in its light.
Be that as it may, Foucault attributes both the dawn of a pattern of thought that
is announced in Nietzsche's overcoming of Western grammar, as well as the
thought of Grimm, Humboldt, and Bopp, to one common event that by now we
know sufficiently well.
In attempting to reconstitute the lost unity of language, is one carrying
to its conclusion a thought which is that of the nineteenth century, or is
one pursuing forms that are already incompatible with it? The disper-
sion of language is linked, in fact, in a fundamental way, with the ar-
chaeological event we may designate as the disappearance of Discourse.
To discover the vast play of language contained once more within a sin-
gle space might be just as decisive a leap towards a wholly new form of
thought as to draw to a close a mode of knowing constituted during the
previous century. (307)
In short, if the completely new thought that begins with Foucault's archaeology
and the thought of the historic-hermeneutic nineteenth century are based on the
LECTURE 9 CJ 145
same conditions of constitution, then they obviously are figures jumelles, just as
philology on the one side and absolute poetry on the other. The division in Fou-
cault's thought thus would be the irreconciled schism in the thought of the nine-
teenth century itself, and not the archaeological overcoming of this schism.
Foucault admits this himself.
It is true that I do not know what to reply to such questions, or, given
these alternatives, what term I should choose. I cannot even guess
whether I shall ever be able to answer them, or whether the day will
come when I shall have reasons enough to make any such choice.
Nevertheless, I now know why I am able, like everyone else, to ask
them-and I am unable not to ask them today. (307)
Nevertheless, Foucault believes that he still has something to say in regard to the
"human sciences," for example, that there was no such form of science in the clas-
sical age.
Faced with so many instances of ignorance, so many questions remain-
ing in suspense, no doubt some decision must be made. One must say:
there is where discourse ends, and perhaps labour begins again. Yet
there are still a few more words to be saidwords whose status it is
probably difficult to justify, since it is a matter of introducing at the last
moment, rather like some deus ex machina, a character who has not yet
appeared in the great Classical interplay of representations. (307)
He is speaking of the human being. In the previously mentioned painting by
Velasquez, Las meninas, Foucault believes that the human being was totally miss-
ing as subject-center of representation. This painting shows a painter in the posi-
tion in which he is painting his model, the king. The king himself remains outside
the painting in a position that is in the vicinity of the position of the actual viewer.
While the king, however, participates in the play of representations (one can de-
tect his mirror image in the background to the right), the real subject of the viewer
remains outside this play of representations: the personage for whom the image
is an image is not present. Foucault draws from this the following conclusion:
In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists,
and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an
image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of
the "representation in the form of a picture or table" he is never to be
found in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century,
man did not exist-any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of
labour, or the historical density of language. He is a quite recent crea-
ture, which the demiurge of knowledge fabricated with its own hands
less than two hundred years ago: but he has grown old so quickly that
it has been only too easy to imagine that he had been waiting for thou-
146 LECTURE 9
sands of years in the darkness for that moment of illumination in which
he would finally be known. (308)
Here we come across one of the most famous theses in Foucault's archaeology,
and it is not particularly shocking to us, for we already encountered it in the pref-
ace to The Order of Things. Of course it is not Foucault's opinion that the human
being was not already a theme of knowledge in the classical age or even in earlier
ages; but it was not a theme in the sense of being an irreducible and transcendental
knowledge subject, without the presupposition of which the entire world of objec-
tivities and positivities would collapse into nothingness, as it is expressed in
Schopenhauer's concise statement: "No subject, no object." In other words, the
human being was not a particular epistemological problem as such; it was not that
which above all was knowledgeable and which had to be known (OT
y
309), that
which in part reshaped the sciences into human sciences or Geisteswissen-
schaften.
We formulated our doubts already at an earlier point: it is extremely hard to
make plausible that the self-reflecting human subject is not supposed to be a direct
and continual consequence of the classical view, according to which every
representation {reprsentation) is self-reflexive. How could anyone who con-
ceives the capacity for representation as endowed with the capability to represent
itself possibly see a new paradigm in Kant's and Fichte's philosophy of conscious-
ness, especially since the old claims to universality of the Enlightenment are
preserved in the act of absolute self-consciousness?
We also saw, however, that Foucault's antipathy is not so much directed at this
theorem of self-reflexive representation. To state it outright: his objection is in no
way aimed at absolute self-consciousness (and this distinguishes him, obviously,
from other thinkers of neostructuralism). He expressly refers to Descartes who,
after all, is considered the founder of modern philosophy of self-consciousness.
The transition from the "I think" to the "I am" was accomplished in the
light of evidence, within a discourse whose whole domain and function-
ing consisted in articulating one upon the other what one represents to
oneself and what is. (311-12)
Such a representational relation between Being and thinking of the human sub-
ject, according to Foucault, does not place excessive demands on the limits of
classical discourse; on the contrary, it is its consummate expression. Human
nature is a folding of representation back upon itself (309): it is self-conscious
representing o/something. Foucault even speaks of a being-represented of things
in the mind's eye.
In the Classical age, discourse is that translucent necessity representa-
tion and beings must pass as beings are represented to the mind's eye
and as representation renders beings visible in their truth. (311)
LECTURE 9 147
If it is not this absolute self-transparency that Foucault rebukes as specific to post-
classical, human-scientific knowledge, then what is it?
The answer seems astonishing, even if we are by now prepared for such sur-
prises in Foucault: it is the romantic reinterpretation of the subject as self-relation
without fathomable ground. What Foucault has to say about this is extremely
stimulating. Let's concentrate for now on the kernel of his idea. If representation,
according to Foucault, in the process of folding back upon itself meets at the same
time something other that cannot be completely dissolved into the gaze of con-
sciousness, then self-relation, which representation exists as, literally feels itself
to be overextended. Self-consciousness senses itself as having risen from a
ground to which it is not itself ground, and which it can also no longer dissolve
into absolute self-consciousness. This basic figure of thoughtwhich we first
come across in such a pointed manifestation in Novalis and Hlderlin, then in the
later Fichte, in Schelling, Solger, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Feuerbach
as well-can appear in various guises: first of all, as the finality of the human be-
ing that does not hold in its hand the conditions of its existing; or as consciousness
without access to the infinite, and thus without the possibility of continuing to
think within the boundaries of metaphysics; second, as a "doublet empirico-
transcendantal." On the one hand, each knowledge and action can only be
grounded in a transcendental reflection; on the other hand, this reflection does not
escape empirical reality, finality, and historicality: discourse becomes empirico-
transcendental and empirico-critical at the same time. And third, the figure of the
unfathomable ground appears in the imagery of "cogito and the unthought" (OT,
322n\): the unthought and unthinkable is the shadow, as it were, that falls upon
self-consciousness and obscures it, insofar as it has an apodictic, but in no way
adequate, knowledge of itself (as the classical age had assumed). Self-conscious-
ness is thus no longer absolutely present to itself.
In the modern cogito, on the other hand, we are concerned to grant the
highest value, the greatest dimension, to the distance that both separates
and links thought-conscious-of-itself and whatever, within thought, is
rooted in non-thought. The modern cogiio . . . must traverse, dupli-
cate, and reactivate in an explicit form the articulation of thought on
everything within it, around it, and beneath it which is not thought, yet
which is nevertheless not foreign to thought, in the sense of an irreduc-
ible, an insuperable exteriority. (OT, 324)
The best-known expression of this would be the (romantic, Schopenhauerian, or
Freudian) unconscious (327), but the "ineffaceable and fundamental relation to
the unthought" can also be, as in Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenology, "the
implicit, the inactuaK the sedimented, the non-effected" (327) or an "ontology of
the unthought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the 'I think' " (326).
"The unthought," Foucault adds, "is, in relation to man, the Other" (326), from
148 D LECTURE 9
which we can conclude in passing that he certainly would consider Lacan's psy-
choanalysis to be a human-scientific form of knowledge. But we still have to look
at the fourth form in which the figure of the indisposable ground of knowledge
is cloaked, namely, temporality as search for the lost ground (OT, 328fl\). To ex-
ist without ground means not only to exist without justification but also to achieve
self-consciousness on a basis that always already is cast off and overcome. This
kind of nonpresence is the temporality or noncontemporaneousness of the human
being in the face of that under whose presupposition it exists ("thought reveals
that man is not contemporaneous with what makes him be"; 334).
Timethe time that he himself is cuts him off not only from the dawn
from which he sprang but also from that other dawn promised him as
still to come. It is clear how this fundamental timethis time on the ba-
sis of which time can be given to experienceis different from that
which was active in the philosophy of representation: then, time dis-
persed representation, since it imposed the form of a linear sequence
upon it; but representation was able to reconstitute itself for itself in im-
agination, and thus to duplicate itself perfectly and to subjugate
time. . . . In the modern experience, on the contrary, the retreat of
the origin is more fundamental than all experience, since it is in it that
experience shines and manifests its positivity; it is because man is not
contemporaneous with his being that things are presented to him with a
time that is proper to them. And here we meet once again the initial
theme of finitude. (335)
This basic premise of modern knowledge also, of course, touches on the dis-
course in which and through which modern knowledge articulates itself. Classical
discourse and we saw that Foucault considers it to be discourse as suchcould
unfold itself on a permanent table of stable differences and limited identities
(339). This is entirely different from the "discourse of the analytic of finitude":
it operates within an irreversible time order and on the assumption that the origin
has been lost. But the mere Being-related to the thought of a lost origin makes
it into thought of the Same (une pense du Mme) in the form of thought in con-
tinuities. Continuity presupposes both difference and identity; for everything that
is continuous bridges different aggregates or states of Being, and thus different
times. But the same is true for identity, for we call continuous only that time span
in which One remains dynamically identical with itself over the course of chang-
ing states. Foucault justifiably finds in this disposition of modern thought the
archaeological origin for the formation of dialectics. In contrast to classical
thought, to which the Manifold of differences and limited identities was harmless,
since it did not impinge upon the concept of a homogeneous, but analytical and
time-indifferent reason, modern thought has to integrate dialectically its dissemi-
nation: it is both loss of a grounding unity and search for the lost ground. (A note
in passing: We can tell to what extent Foucault's definition of modernism is in-
LECTURE 9 D 149
spired by the self-understanding of romanticism.) Foucault speaks of thought of
the Same that is always to be conquered anew by means of contradiction ("a
thought of the Same, still to be conquered in its contradiction: which im-
plies . . . a dialectic"; 339-40);
a dialectical interplay and an ontology without metaphysics; for modern
thought is one that moves no longer towards the never-completed for-
mation of Difference, but towards the ever-to-be-accomplished unveil-
ing of the Same. Now, such an unveiling is not accomplished without
the simultaneous appearance of the Double, and that hiatus, minuscule
and yet invincible, which resides in the "and" of retreat and return, of
thought and the unthought, of the empirical and the transcendental, of
what belongs to the order of positivity and what belongs to the order of
foundations. Identity separated from itself by a distance which, in one
sense, is interior to it, but, in another, constitutes it, and repetition
which posits identity as a datum, but in the form of distance, are with-
out doubt at the heart of that modern thought to which the discovery of
time has so hastily been attributed. (340)
Hastily {htivement) because, according to Foucault, the model of a "distance
creating a vacuum within the Same" (ibid.) can more easily be questioned by
means of metaphors of spatial division, whereas classical taxonomical thought
operates with the model of a continuous sequence of time that is ever-to-be-
returning to its ubiquitous origin. According to this, the espacement, of which
Mallarm and Derrida dream as the prerequisite for a "dissminai discourse," is
a specific "historical a priori" of modernism, and not of a coming "postmodern
condition": a new kind of thought first outlined in Nietzsche in which it will be
possible to think "in the void left by the disappearance of the human being" ("It
is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disap-
pearance"; Or, 342).
We cannot at this moment decide what this thought beyond the "human being"
who stands in the center might look like. I will report what Foucault has to say
about it in my next lecture.
Lecture 10
These lectures, concerned with the question "What is neostructuralism?," roughly
follow this outline: after making some preliminary observations regarding the
systematical and historical limits of the phenomenon, we wanted to investigate
neostructuralism in terms of three questions. First, what does it say about the
phenomenon of history? Second, how does it explain the phenomenon of subjec-
tivity? And third, what theory of sign formation and of meaning effects does it
have at its disposal?
So far we only began to answer the first question and have in no way exhausted
it. It was obvious that we should direct this question at Michel Foucault and Louis
Aithusser, for both thinkers search for a structural explanation of the phenome-
non of "history" on comparable theoretical foundations. First of all, we decided
to start with an exploration of Foucault's most readable bookI hesitate to call
it his major work, since neostructuralism knows no "major works." We did this
not just in order blindly to begin somewhere, but rather because this work sup-
plies us with illustrative material not only with its methodological abstrac-
tion, but with the example of a concrete piece of knowledge-sociological
historiographyof what Foucault understands under "archaeology." Moreover,
we began with this work because it promises to give us an idea of what we call
Geisteswissenschaften or "human sciences" in a manner that itself is not human-
scientific.
We saw that Foucault rejects for his own historiography the concept of a hu-
man being that sovereignly projects its history. He considers the human subject
to be a recent, i.e., romantic invention that will perish much as it began. Sup-
i sn
LbCJlUKt 1U U 131
ported by Heidegger's "history of Being," he wants to explain the change of what
he calls epistemes (orders of knowledge), not on the basis of the acts of subjects,
but by means of sendings (Schickungen) whose origin we cannot understand, but
whose "historical a prions" can be analytically reconstructed. The theory that ex-
poses the historical a priori of a momentarily dominant discourse would be "ar-
chaeology."
This apparently purely methodological observation implies a massive thesis on
the essence of subjectivity that is a persistent element in all of neostructuralism.
This procedure assumes that subjectivity always finds itself in the position of
something that has been implanted, or to be more exact, in the position of some-
thing that is instituted by a symbolic order. The gaze with which we disclose our
world and ourselves is implanted into us, or, taken literally, "in-oculated" into us
by the inescapable a priori of the epistemic structure. As soon as & symbolic order
has intervened in us, it is too late to declare ourselves to be the instituters of this
gaze.
One can understand this standpoint entirely independently of the question of
whether it correctly explains subjectivity. It even seems that certain subject-
centric overaccentuations of traditional historiography are favorably corrected.
What was confusing to us, however, was a certain ambiguity in Foucault's attitude
toward the model of representation of knowledge. Applied to the theory of the
subject, this means that the subject at any given time is able to account for the
actions through which it discloses the world because it also represents itself in all
representations of something. This theory of knowledge appeared toward the end
of the eighteenth century-in Kant, Reinhold, and the early Fichte-and we saw
that it developed continuously out of what Foucault called the representationism
of the classical age. One would expect Foucault bluntly to reject this theory, for
it is incompatible with the view that the subject springs up on a ground that not
only escapes its consciousness, but even determines this consciousness. But it is
precisely this step that Foucault does not take; he does not attack Cartesianism-
the principle of the transparency of knowledge unto itself; rather he attacks its
obscuration by the romantic discovery of the unconscious or the unthought that
is prior to consciousness and not at its disposal, be it "absolutely transcendental
Being" (Schelling), or "unconscious" (Schopenhauer). In every case, however, it
is that ungraspable identity that escapes all representation that allows the relation
of self-consciousness to arrive at the certainty of being the relation of One to itself
(and not to something else): "a thought of the Same, still to be conquered in its
contradiction" (OT, 339). Our question, which remains open, was whether Fou-
cault does not also tear down the foundations of his own archaeology with his cri-
tique of such a widely introduced formation of modern thought, especially since
he leaves no doubt that he is willing to exclude neither Nietzsche's nor Marx's
nor Freud's nor Mallarm's thought from the game-rules of modern discourse (or
at least, as in Nietzsche's case, only with characteristic reservations). It is these
152 LECTURE 10
authors, however, to whom neostructuralism commonly refers as the forerunners
of a still unknown future thought "in the void left by the disappearance of the hu-
man being."
To answer our question we have to take a closer look at what Foucault
describes as characteristic of the "human sciences." This episteme that is charac-
teristic for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rises, according to Foucault, out
of the decline of the Enlightenment axiom of universality : universal formalization
and research of the fundamental principles of empirical events from now on do
not go hand in hand. Thus formal logic, the deductive and exact natural sciences,
and analytical philosophy on the one hand, as well as the hermeneutically founded
disciplines, are simultaneously formed. The dispute in which they are engaged
is preprogrammed and cannot be decided on the basis of a dominating paradigm.
Hence that double and inevitable contestation: that which lies at the root
of the perpetual controversy between the sciences of man and the
sciences properthe first laying an invincible claim to be the founda-
tion of the second, which are ceaselessly obliged in turn to seek their
own foundation, the justification of their method, and the purification of
their history, in the teeth of "psychologism," "sociologism," and
"historicism"; and that which lies at the root of the endless controversy
between philosophy, which objects to the navet with which the human
sciences try to provide their own foundation, and those same human
sciences which claim as their rightful object what would formerly have
constituted the domain of philosophy. (OT, 345-46)
This schism, as I said, is preprogrammed in the division of the empirical and the
transcendental. Since Kant and German idealism, however, there have been
constant attempts to overcome this division, i.e., attempts to find constitutive
(and not only regulative) principles-to this extent one may call these attempts
"transcendental"-which at the same time cover the field of the empiricities (to
this extent these attempts are "positive"). After the decline of idealism, anthropol-
ogy inherits this claim to reconciliation: a completely new discipline that claims
to be both transcendental and empirical and that lends the entire epoch the pattern
of its episteme. Marxism and historicism, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, even
the social sciences-all take part in it. Anthropology is transcendental: the world
is explained from the standpoint of the human being and of the specifically human
production or attribution of meaning. At the same time, anthropology is empiri-
cal, for it takes human activity, as Marx calls it, as an "objectified activity," and
no longer as a purely spiritual or transcendental spontaneity that can only inter-
vene in the realm of the existing world by means of several mediations. Reference
to the "historico-transcendental" or the "empirico-transcendental" can indeed be
found in the texts important for the formation of theory in the human sciences,
LECTURE 10 153
from romanticism (Friedrich Schlegel) to Jrgen Habermas. Foucault speaks of
an infringement of the transcendental upon the empirical, or also of a fold.
In this Fold, the transcendental function is doubled over so that it
covers with its dominating network the inert, grey space of empiricity;
inversely, empirical contents are given life, gradually pull themselves
upright, and are immediately subsumed in a discourse which carries
their transcendental presumption into the distance. And so we find phi-
losophy falling asleep once more in the hollow of this Fold: this time
not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology. (341)
Here Foucault alludes to the well-known statement by Kant that David Hume
awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber" (Prolegomena, A 13). What is needed,
therefore, is a new Kant who would again prohibit the inadmissible mixture of
the transcendental with the empirical for which the epistemological phantom of
a constitutive human subject (which simultaneously is never completely transpar-
ent to itself) is responsible. Nietzsche, who dreams of the overcoming of the hu-
man being by Superman, could be such a Kant of postmodern thought, if not for
the fact that his vitalism and historicism share important presuppositions with the
historical a priori of the anthropological slumber (341-42). The "will to power"
shows all too obviously the traces of early capitalist society of competition, the
study of which even led the economist Malthus to the idea that only the best-
adapted individuals, i.e., those who are most competitive, could possibly sur-
vive, so that one would have to prevent the population explosion of "the poorest
and most numerous class.'
1
From his reading of Malthus, Darwin, in turn, on his
voyage to the New World, developed his working hypothesis that it is the "strug-
gle for existence" that reduces the natural overproduction by means of natural
selection to the number of individuals who are best adapted to their biotope. On
the basis of this historical a priori Nietzsche ultimately comes to the conclusion
that the will that dominates in the West's orientation to truth is "in truth" a will
to seize power: a will not only to the preservation of existence, but also to intensi-
fication of existence. Thus there arises in him the vision of the "breeding"
(Ziichtung) (conceived completely in terms of genetics) "of a new type of human
being" of the Homo natura or of the Superman who recognizes the will to truth
as a lie of life, and who in joyful acquiescence to fate (amorfati), says "Yea and
Amen" to the "beautiful cruel life" and who stands above the species Homo
sapiens sapiens just as the latter stands above the primates {Works, XI, 6-9).
To be sure, in comparison with metaphysics this is a "new kind of thinking,"
and it is also true that it is a thinking dans le vide de Vhomme disparu. But it is
just as true, and Foucault recognizes this, that Nietzsche's thought believes it has
uncovered once again in the "will to power" a principle that is simultaneously
transcendental and empirical, and whose functioning epistemologically is totally
in keeping with Humboldt's language energy and Marx's productive force of la-
154 D LECTURE 10
bor, and to this extent it reveals itself to be a typical product of anthropological
knowledge. This is also valid for the being-obscure-to-itself of the "will to
power," as it is lyrically expressed in Zarathustra's Dancing-Song: "Of late did
I gaze into thine eye, O Life! And into the unfathomable did I there seemed to
sink" (Works, XI, 127). Even more telling is the metaphor with which the essay
"On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense" describes human consciousness:
it is "hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger" (Works, II, 176). This life (vie)
is simultaneously unfathomable (unergrundlich) as well as grounding (griin-
dend). Thus it is transcendental, but it is at the same time the ens realissimum,
the realest and most familiar, and thus an empirical and by no means intelligible
power. Even teleology is not missing in Nietzsche's dream of the overcoming of
the current human being: "The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your
will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!" (Works, XI, 7).
If one suppresses these traces of the nineteenth century in Nietzsche's works,
one could predict ex negative) the direction in which postanthropological thought
would have to unfold according to Foucault's wish.
If the discovery of the Return is indeed the end of philosophy, then the
end of man, for its part, is the return of the beginning of philosophy. It
is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by
man's disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it does
not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and noth-
ing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible
to think. (OT
9
342)
Under the "obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent new form of
thought" (342), Foucault numbers above all the obstacle that exists in the asser-
tion that one cannot think without immediately also thinking that it is the human
being that is thinking, and he continues:
To all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only
with a philosophical laugh which means, to a certain extent, a silent
one. (343)
We did not really want to know so clearly, you will say, in which direction that
"imminent new form of thought" moves. Since we now know it, however, we
have to take a stand on it.
First of all, we can state that the ambiguity of Foucault's approach does not
decrease, but rather increases in the case of his position on the human sciences.
Under the conditions of a strictly archaeological approach, a positive or negative
judgment on the epistemic formations should not be possible. Furthermore, it
seems just as illegitimate to say that a certain epistemic form no longer allows
thought, whereas the most recent one still allowed it. For with this, "thought"
would be defined in a transarchaeological manner and would no longer arise from
LECTURE 10 155
the simultaneously positive and relative ground of a symbolic order: "thought"
would become, in other words, a signifi transcendantal. At this point in Fou-
cault's argument we observe a clear, no longer archaeologically demonstrable
opting for the model of representation: in it "thought" was obviously still possible.
Even a political and certainly more Nietzschean than ethical option is implied
in Foucault's theoretical antihumanism, namely, opting against "a leftist thought"
in which the human origin of all institutions, all epistemes, and all practices is
constantly emphasized. This antidemocratic option, too, strictly contradicts the
premises of archaeology, which may reconstruct the positive ground of a knowl-
edge, but may not evaluate this knowledge on a moral or argumentative basis.
To be sure, such an evaluation seems inevitable to me, but I believe that it effaces
the basic lines of Foucault's theoretical approach. Once the field of ethics and of
argumentation is reopened, we find ourselves in the middle of the epistemic field
of the nineteenth century in which left and right positions fight each other, in
which better arguments are weighed against worse ones, in which claims to valid-
ity are examined transcendentally as well as empirically, etc. Even Foucault's im-
plicit (and not reflected) ethics (which perhaps manifests, despite some poignant
statements that received more applause from the political Right, for example,
from the Nouvelle Droite, than from the Left, not a truly "Right," but rather an
anarchistic thinking) does not circumvent the game-rules of the human sciences
simply because it ignores them or does not expressly reflect on them. The opin-
ion, moreover, that in premodern knowledge "thought" was still possible on the
basis of the model of representation of knowledge and designation turns out to
be archaeological in a sense that Foucault himself cannot possibly have intended,
and that makes his endeavorthrough a trick of reason - outdated and antiquar-
ian. It does not open up a new thinking; rather it opens the backdoor to what we
already know and do not necessarily wish the return of.
The final chapter of The Order of Things is dedicated to the human sciences
as such, but it hardly lends new insights to what we already know. Foucault places
what he calls the human sciences into a scarcely intelligible relation with a triad
of existing and exact sciences ("The three faces of knowledge"; OT, 344ff.). Its
three faces are: first, the purely deductive sciences, above all mathematics and
physics; second, the empirical sciences (linguistics, biology, economy); and
third, philosophical reflection. The human sciences do not belong to any of these
three forms of knowledge and consequently are not sciences at all. They do, how-
ever, maintain relationships with the three types of knowledge he lists. What Fou-
cault has to say about this is not particularly illuminating. What is more important
is how he grasps the difference between the human sciences and the real sciences:
according to him, the human sciences do not have different methods or even a
different object than the sciences in the strict sense; rather they interpret their ob-
ject differently. The human being appears in them "as the foundation of all positiv-
ities . . . man became that upon the basis of which all knowledge could be con-
156 D LECTURE 10
stituted as immediate and non-problematized evidence; he became, a fortiori, that
which justified the calling into question of all knowledge of man" (345). Thus the
"essential instability" of the human sciences (348). For a representation that is
based on subjective constitution (cf. 352-53) ipso facto becomes a rvisable
representation whose inconstancy continuously falls back on the human subject
in the background of all regularities and occurrences. The human sciences pose
as metasciences or hypersciences vis--vis the real sciences (whose validity Fou-
cault here, as often, underlines; cf. 354-55) in that they duplicate them in a
subject-theoretical manner.
Here, the human sciences, when they duplicate the sciences of lan-
guage, labour, and life, when at their finest point they duplicate them-
selves, are directed not at the establishment of formalized discourse: on
the contrary, they thrust man, whom they take as their object in the
area of finitude, relativity, and perspective, down into the area of the
endless erosion of time. (355)
However, how is the transposition of scientific methods onto human-scientific
methods accomplished? Foucault mentions three "models" (taken from biology,
from economy, and from linguistics), which he also calls human-scientific "cate-
gories" (357): these are the pairs function and norm, conflict and rule, significa-
tion {signification) or meaning (sens) and system (357). With the first term of each
of these pairs, the constituting and, so to speak, active or genetic element of the
relationship is given; with the second, the deep-structural order that, although it-
self not falling under consciousness, guarantees the course, the interpretability,
and the masterability of the first. In the course of the nineteenth century, Foucault
believes, the deep-structural element attracted more and more the interest of the
human sciences. Whereas formerly function sought its norm, conflicts remained
unregulated if possible, and significations did not fit into a system, now functions,
conflicts, and significations are vouched for by norm, rule, and linguistic system.
"Everything may be thought within the order of the system, the rule, and the
norm" (360). Freud's name represents the zenith of this movement.
[Freud] prefigures the transition from an analysis in terms of functions,
conflicts, and significations to an analysis in terms of norms, rules, and
systems: thus all this knowledge, within which Western culture had
given itself in one century a certain image of man, pivots on the work
of Freud, though without, for all that, leaving its fundamental arrange-
ment. But even so, it is not here-as we shall see later on that the
most decisive importance of psychoanalysis lies. (361)
We already said more than once that it is not easy to render in a clear way the
difference that Foucault apparently ordains between the process of unveiling in
psychoanalytic hermeneutics, for example, which functions human-scientifically,
LECTURE 10 157
and the process of unveiling in his own archaeology. When he says about history
(which he places in the vicinity of the human sciences), for example, that "to each
of the sciences of man it offers a background, which establishes it and provides
it with a fixed ground and, as it were, a homeland; it determines the cultural
area . . . in which that branch of knowledge can be recognized as having valid-
ity" (371), then we may justifiably ask ourselves whether archaeology does not
want the same thing or something indistinguishably similar: namely, to survey
the symbolical, discursive, or epistemic ground that determines as historical a
priori the thought and actions of an epoch. A second analogy comes up in this
context: in order to escape the trap of the theory of self-consciousness of the
human subject, archaeology assumes that the historical ground on which an
epistemic formation rests is unconscious and not representable; but even this it
shares with what it says about the theoretical premises of the human sciences. We
will see in a concluding discussion of Les Mots et les choses how this precarious
and, at the very least, ambiguous relation is explained.
The question we are asking ourselves is, to what extent does the archaeological
reduction of an epochal self-understanding to an unconscious historical ground
depart from the human-scientific one? This question obviously is tied to the ques-
tion about the role that "representation" plays in the human sciences on the one
hand, and in Foucault's archaeology on the other. Freud, the theoretician of the
unconscious (as system), spoke of the "regard for representability," or of "drive
representations"in conformity with an old romantic model that, once again, is
most clearly brought to light in Schopenhauer's major work: on the one hand,
being is unconscious wanting, and, on the other, indirectly the object of our
representations. Without denying that the will has primacy in self-conscious-
ness,
1
this conception nevertheless concedes that there are representations of the
will without which the unconscious could not be scientifically thematized. Fou~
cault emphasizes this as a constant trait of the ambiguous position the human
sciences have toward the model of representation: to be able to be represented
does not fundamentally mean to appear to an explicit consciousness (OT,
361-62); it only means to be able to appear to a consciousness.
In fact, representation is not consciousness, and there is nothing to
prove that this bringing to light of elements or structures that are never
presented to consciousness as such enables the human sciences to es-
cape the law of representation. (361)
Applied to language theory of the nineteenth century this means that the role of
the concept of signification, so says Foucault, implies the representability of
speech for consciousness, even if this speech is neither explicitly nor consciously
penetrated with it; in contrast to this, the concept of the linguistic system (in the
sense of Humboldt and Schleiermacher) is principally unconscious: "in relation
158 D LECTURE 10
to the consciousness of a signification, the system is indeed always unconscious
since it was there before the signification" (362). But this unconsciousness of the
system is not principally given; it arises because "the system is always promised
to a future consciousness which will perhaps never add it up" (362). That is, the
unconsciousness is not based on a principle but rather is structural. Due to the
irreducible cooperation of the speaking subjects in the process of meaning forma-
tion, that the system controls only as a mere virtuality, one never commands a
view of the entire system: its unconsciousness is the here and now not yet realized
potentials of meaning formation whose absolute and conscious presencing is
thwarted by the openness of human history.
Foucault thus believes that the significance of unconsciousness that the human
sciences confer on the system, the rule, and the norm, does not, as it were, en-
danger the primacy of representation ("It must not be forgotten, therefore, that
the increasingly marked importance of the unconscious in no way compromises
the primacy of representation"; 363). For without the possibility of making their
unconscious present, the human sciences would have to renounce any claim to
being forms of knowledge of something. Insofar as they insist on the claim of
mediating a specific knowledge of the human being, they approach classical
thought (for all thought, Foucault obviously believes, is representation; 363-64).
On the other hand, the human sciences take up a critical position vis--vis the
means that elevate them to the status of sciences, and thus vis--vis representa-
tion: they asktranscendentally orientedabout the conditions of possibility of
such knowledge, and this condition of possibility itself is supposed to be repre-
sentable.
They never cease to exercise a critical examination of themselves. They
proceed from that which is given to representation to that which renders
representation possible, but which is still representation. . . . This
quasi-transcendental process is always given in the form of an unveil-
ing. It is always by an unveiling that they are able, as a consequence,
to become sufficiently generalized or refined to conceive of individual
phenomena. On the horizon of any human science, there is the project
of bringing man's consciousness back to its real conditions, of restoring
it to the contents and forms that brought it into being, and elude us
within it; this is why the problem of the unconscious . . . is not sim-
ply a problem within the human sciences which they can be thought of
as encountering by chance in their steps; it is a problem that is ulti-
mately coextensive with their very existence. A transcendental raising
of level that is, on the other side, an unveiling of the non-conscious is
constitutive of all the sciences of man. (364)
Fine, one will say; as a description of the human-scientific method and its knowl-
edge interests what Foucault says is not inappropriate. But at which location can
he set the lever of archaeology in order to lift the methodology of the human
LECTURE 10 159
sciences off the hinges on which they have pivoted (pivot) for a hundred years,
i.e., since Freud?
As far as I can see, The Order ofThings provides no clear answer to this impor-
tant question. We can, however, sketch the site where it could have been given.
Foucault reproaches the human sciences for using circular argumentation: they
allow for an unconscious in the background of the subject (of labor, of life, of
speech), and to this extent they depart from the paradigm of the universal self-
representation of knowledge; on the other hand, they need representation, which
is always representation-for-a-consciousness, in order to establish themselves as
sciences. These claims, however, are incompatible with one another.
If I have correctly reproduced Foucault's view of what he calls "this peculiar
property of the human sciences" (364), then one could, in contrast to this, depict
the concept of such an unconscious that cannot be converted into representation.
To be sure, even archaeology seeks to lay bare the historical substratum of a form
of knowledge in a manner that can be described as "quasi-transcendental." Yet
it does not do this, as do the human sciences, in such a way that it lays bare a
foundation of this knowledge that is representable to knowledge, which, in the
final analysis, would have to be interpreted as a subject untransparent unto itself.
The substratum of knowledge, even of that of the human sciences, is not the hu-
man being but rather the episteme, the symbolic configuration of the "positivity"
ruling at any given time.
In any case, we can see that what manifests this peculiar property of
the human sciences is not that privileged and singularly blurred object
which is man. For the good reason that it is not man who constitutes
them and provides them with a specific domain; it is the general ar-
rangement of the episteme that provides them with a site, summons
them, and establishes them-thus enabling them to constitute man as
their object. (364)
Even if I cannot make out precisely where the argument lies here, one can easily
see the point of defense against, and of contrast to, the human sciences: the tran-
scendental self-reflection of the human sciences remains narcissistic; in the struc-
tural unconscious in norm, rule, or systemit always finds only what it already
brought into play as its premise, namely, the grounding power of the human be-
ing. Precisely for this reason it misses its real ground; namely, the positivity of
the episteme s.
How is one supposed to think about this positivity without falling back into the
aporias of the human sciences? As eloquent and garrulous as Foucault otherwise
is, what he says about this point at the end of The Order of Things is laconic. The
book concludes with a view of two forms of knowledge, psychoanalysis and eth-
nology (373 ff.). In them the transition from the modern to the postmodern
episteme is accomplished; or to be more correct, these two disciplines inspire
Lecture 11
With The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault wants to finish up what he an-
nounced and already presented in concrete analysis in The Order of Things but
had not yet theoretically legitimated, namely, he wants to supply some informa-
tion about the methodological status of an "archaeology" that differs from the
procedures of "history" {histoire), understood in the traditional sense of the word
(07, xxii).
The Archaeology of Knowledge works out the foundations for the formation
and transformation of discourses.
1
"Discourse" no longer means, as in The Order
of Things, the form of knowledge of the classical age {ge classique) and the
model of representation that is characteristic for it; rather it means every system
of statements {systme d'noncs) that occurs in history that holds together the set
of statements mastered by it by means of a finite number of rules and that protects
them from dissolution into another system of statements. I know that this defini-
tion is once again rather vague and almost unusable according to the rigid stan-
dards of analytical philosophy; nonetheless (or even: for that very reason), the
fashionable use of the term "discourse" has its origin in this broad definition.
The Archaeology of Knowledge is a difficult book. This is true not only be-
cause it is intellectually especially strenuous but also because itdeviating from
the tradition of all comparable "Discours de la mthode'" (from Descartes to
Sartre)-defines its concepts either not at all, or badly (although it constantly
mentions the word "definition"; see above all AK, 79ff.).
This is primarily the case, as we will see, for its concept of nonc (with ap-
propriate self-irony Foucault speaks of the "indiscriminate use that I have made
\ftfi>
LbCl ' UKh 11 U 10/
of the terms statement, event, and discourse"; AK, 31). "Statement" (nonc) does
not mean, as an expert in analytical or especially in pragmatic language philoso-
phy would immediately associate, the descriptive proposition, and also not the
pragmatically interpreted utterance. In this way the assertions of Foucault's study
remain overabstract, in Hegel's sense of the word: they allow one to detect with-
out difficulty neither the field of their application nor the general concept to which
they appeal. The only salvation in this case seems to me the supply of concrete
questions that we, as readers, can direct at Foucault's book.
One of several difficulties we came across in our reading of The Order of
Things was the uncertainty about the standpoint from which Foucault actually
speaks as an archaeologist. Since he unfolds a concrete and well-documented his-
tory of the transformations of the classical and the modern epistemes, it remains
undecided in most instances whether he is reporting the thematized position of
representation in indirect speech, that of history, or his own. The Archaeology
of Knowledge places itself above this dispute and explicates its own procedure
without constant reference to the Enlightenment and to postromanticism. This
liberates it from a number of ambiguities, for example, from the uncertainty of
whether "archaeology" organically grows out of the historical reflections of, say,
Marxism, or out of the psychoanalytical founding of the unconscious through a
kind of overintensification, or whether it actually introduces an entirely new form
of knowledge. Since 1969 we can positively determine that Foucault means the
latter; however, he still must answer the question of whether archaeology seeks
to be a "true" theory of the succession of discourses, as it were, or whether it only
puts a new, itself relative discourse in the place of the discourse that was recently
dismissed (namely, the "modern" one). This question, of course, applies analo-
gously to hermeneutics and historicism (taken as forms of knowledge) and throws
us once again into the uncertainty of whether the schism between archaeology and
presumably traditional and historical questioning is really methodologically and
theoretically so radical and total. Should archaeology itself turn out to be one dis-
course among others, one would not be able to determine whence it derives the
right theoretically to criticize forms of thought such as hermeneutics, speculative
dialectics, or historicism; if it situates itself, however, as a theory beyond those
Western discourses that de facto have occurred, then it would inherit the ancient
Western claim to being a definite theoria, a unified total view of objects and
speeches in their truth that itself is not affected by historical change; i.e., it would
resemble the explanatory claim of Hegel's philosophy, for example, even though
not the explanatory means that Hegel's philosophy employs. The Archaeology of
Knowledge unfortunately does not provide us with an answer to this first question.
In its concluding chapter, well worth reading, it defends its standpoint against a
representative of classical subject-related philosophy of history in a fashion simi-
lar to the way that a representative of subject philosophy would critically and ar-
160 a LECTURE 10
Foucault's thinking to gather courage for his belief that "something new is about
to begin, something we glimpse only as a thin line of light low on the horizon"
(384). What is just barely touched upon here is the finitude of the human being.
But how does that come about? Through a return of language, Foucault answers.
Re-turn: the semantics of this expression implies a recurrent movement. Only
what has already existed can return. That is also Foucault's opinion. In the work
of Freud, Lvi-Strauss, and Saussure the structure (of language, of life, of econ-
omy) becomes once again autonomous, it uncouples itself from speech, and thus
from effects of meaning. Herewith we see what the human sciences always tried
anew to reduce to the performance of a subjectivity: the reduction of the uncon-
scious in its absolute irreducibility to the consequence of occurrences that are
generated by it and from it (376-77). The human being dissolves; it vanishes in
the universality of unconscious structures.
Ethnology, like psychoanalysis, questions not man himself, as he ap-
pears in the human sciences, but the region that makes possible knowl-
edge about man in general; like psychoanalysis, it spans the whole field
of that knowledge in a movement that tends to reach its boundaries. But
psychoanalysis makes use of the particular relation of the transference
in order to reveal, on the outer confines of representation, Desire, Law,
and Death, which outline, at the extremity of analytic language and
practice, the concrete figures of finitude; ethnology, on the other hand,
is situated within the particular relation that the Western ratio estab-
lishes with all other cultures; and from that starting-point it avoids the
representations that men in any civilization may give themselves of
themselves, of their life, of their needs, of the significations laid down
in their language; and it sees emerging behind those representations the
norms by which men perform the functions of life, although they reject
their immediate pressure, the rules through which they experience and
maintain their needs, the systems against the background of which all
signification is given to them. The privilege of ethnology and psy-
choanalysis, the reason for their profound kinship and symmetry, must
not be sought, therefore, in some common concern to pierce the pro-
found enigma, the most secret part of human nature; in fact, what il-
luminates the space of their discourse is much more the historical a pri-
ori of all the sciences of man-those great caesuras, furrows, and
dividing-lines which traced man's outline in the Western episteme and
made him a possible area of knowledge. It was quite inevitable, then,
that they should both be sciences of the unconscious: not because they
reach down to what is below consciousness in man, but because they
are directed towards that which, outside man, makes it possible to
know, with a positive knowledge, that which is given to or eludes his
consciousness. (378)
LECTURE 10 D 161
This long passage obviously distinguishes the archaeological from the human-
scientific unveiling of the epistemic basis of the historical self-understanding of
an epoch by asserting that only the former explains the structural presuppositions
that can never be made conscious by the human being, whereas the latter reflec-
tively repeats its historical self-understanding: the image it has of itself and in re-
gard to which it deceives itself. Let's recall the earlier requirement of observing
our own culture with the eyes of the anthropologist. As soon as the human
sciences are studied under this attitude, the consciousness they acquire about
themselves (with the aid of hermeneutical, Marxist, or vitalist categories) disap-
pears, much in the same sense as the editors of the Cours had asserted: "Language
is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the
individual" (CGL, 14).
Foucault reminds one of Saussure when he speaks about the return of lan-
guage. Modern linguisticsas the third discipline, the one that finally brings to
completion the intentions of psychoanalysis and ethnology is the actual model
for archaeology.
Whereupon there is formed the theme of a pure theory of language
which would provide the ethnology and the psychoanalysis thus con-
ceived with their formal model. . . . In linguistics, one would have a
science perfectly founded in the order of positivities exterior to man
(since it is a question of pure language), . . . Thus we see the destiny
of man being spun before our very eyes, but being spun backwards; it
is being led back, by those strange bobbins, to the forms of its birth, to
the homeland that made it possible. And is that not one way of bringing
about its end? For linguistics no more speak of man himself than do
psychoanalysis and ethnology. (OT, 381)
Do you remember that the metaphor of the homeland, to which the self-
consciousness of the human being is led back, already had to function as the
characteristic trait of the innermost intention of the human sciences? Again it is
extremely difficult to detect the actual and radical difference between archaeology
and the human sciences beyond the absolutely intelligible assertions of which
Foucault gives us plenty. For, first of all, even the human sciences bring the
human being to the consciousness of the epistemic ground in which its
self-consciousness is rooted (Marxism and psychoanalysis, after all, are human
sciences); second, it would be entirely absurd to maintain that the human sciences
reduce the unconscious to that knowledge which the human subject gains about
the unconscious through its "unveiling,'
1
whereas archaeology brings to light no
knowledge about the epistemic positivity. What could this "archaeology of the hu-
man sciences," which Foucault presents to us in four hundred pages, be other than
a conversion of unconsciously knowledge-producing structures into explicit
knowledge of these structures. There is even less justification for claiming it is
162 D LECTURE 10
precisely the human sciences that make use of the representation of the uncon-
scious in a circular way, since Foucault explicitly speaks of a return of language
and not of its invention. Is, according to this, the new thought that has become
possible with the death of the human being in a certain sense a new edition of clas-
sical thought of representation and universality? It indeed seems so.
The question as to what language is in its being is once more of the
greatest urgency.
At this point, where the question of language arises again with such
heavy over-determination, and where it seems to lay siege on every side
to the figure of man (that figure which had once taken the place of
Classical Discourse), contemporary culture is struggling to create an
important part of its present, and perhaps of its future. On the one hand
. . . questions arise which before had seemed very distant from them:
these questions concern a general formalization of thought and knowl-
edge; and at a time when they were still thought to be dedicated solely
to the relation between logic and mathematics, they suddenly open up
the possibility, and the task, of purifying the old empirical reason by
constituting formal languages, and of applying a second critique of pure
reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori. . . .
For the entire modern epistemethat which was formed towards the
end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of
our knowledge, that which constituted man's particular mode of being
and the possibility of knowing him empirically that entire episteme
was bound up with the disappearance of Discourse and its featureless
reign, with the shift of language towards objectivity, and with its reap-
pearance in multiple form. If this same language is now emerging with
greater and greater insistence in a unity that we ought to think but can-
not as yet do so, is this not the sign that the whole of this configuration
is now about to topple, and that man is in the process of perishing as
the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our hori-
zon? Since man was constituted at a time when language was doomed
to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its
unity? . . . Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once
more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was for-
merly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse? Man had been a
figure occurring between two modes of language; or, rather, he was
constituted only when language, having been situated within representa-
tion and, as it were, dissolved in it, freed itself from that situation at
the cost of its own fragmentation: man composed his own figure in the
interstices of that fragmented language. Of course, these are not affir-
mations; they are at most questions to which it is not possible to reply;
they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with
the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the
way to a future thought. (382-83, 385-86)
LECTURE 10 163
No matter how many question marks Foucault appends to his thesis about the ad-
vent of a new thought and the end of the human being, they cannot bridge the basic
schism in his theory. Whatever an episteme might be, it is first of all unconscious,
and as "historical a priori" it constitutes, second, the totality of the relations that
in a given epoch lend unity to the discursive practices and forms of knowledge
("By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given
period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences,
and possibly formalized systems"; AK, 191). To what extent could such an over
abstract definition of the "historical a priori" be different from what romanticism
called the "Historic-Transcendental"?
2
Historic-transcendental refers to the con-
dition of possibility of knowledge, speech, and actions. But in contrast to Kant's
categories of the timelessly valid pure reason, here it is a matter of conditions of
possibility that, according to Herder and Hamann, no longer originate in pure rea-
son, but are abstracted from a discursive praxis and discursive form that itself is
historical. Foucault spoke of "transcendentals" (transcendantaux), and we want
to ask to what extent what (since The Archaeology of Knowledge) he calls
"archive"-the system of discursive regularities that characterizes a certain
epochcan be distinguished from a human-scientific "transcendental." Both are
unconscious, both shape a discursive formation, and both, we should not forget,
can be scientifically re-presented.
The attitude toward the concept of representation is among the most untran-
sparent notions in The Order of Things. On the one hand, Foucault condemns the
clouding of the model of representation by the historicization of the sign synthe-
sis, just as romanticism had done; on the other hand, he still reproaches psy-
choanalysis for gradually converting the unconscious into representations. Thus
it never becomes clear whether Foucault rejects or appropriates the model of
representation. That he appropriates it in modified form is supported by the talk
of a "return of language": only something that already existed can "return,"
"resurface," or "reassume its former power." This is also supported by the fact
that he welcomes Saussure and modern linguistics both as return of eighteenth-
century semiotics, and as the overthrow of subject-centric thought. Above all, I
believe it is most strangely supported by the fact that Foucault, as far as I can see,
equates the meaning of the term "to think" with that of "to represent," for example,
when he says that only with the death of the human being will thought again be
possible (which implies that only with the decline of a paradigm of knowledge
that is not founded on the model of representation of the sign will one again be
able "to think"). I assume that Foucault wishes the same transparency for the "new
thought" that he praises in the universal-grammatical thought of the classical age.
For one could scarcely strive for an even greater transparency than that which
is found in the formalized grammars of modern linguistics, and thus Foucault
repeatedly applauds it. To be sure, we do not want to overlook that the regularities
of the discursive field are fundamentally distinct from those of logic or mathe-
164 a LECTURE 10
matics in that they are the rules of actual speech and not those of a preexisting
and, in its performances, incessantly identical code. We will come back to this
issue in our reading of The Archaeology of Knowledge. We may, however, criti-
cally remark that both the rules of formal logic as well as those of a historical
"archive" radically disregard the concrete fashion in which individuals deal with
them in thought and in speech, in order, where possible, to achieve something
entirely different from what the rules of the code prescribe. And disregard for this
links Foucault's variant of structuralism with the universal-grammatical concepts
of the classical age in which thought also represents (reprsente) itself-and thus
its unconquerable regularity-in the use of signs. This representation is success-
ful only if one ignores the irreducible capacity of the thinking and speaking in-
dividuals to relate themselves to a general concept in a singular manner in each
instance. And it is not successful if one takes into account the meaning-creating
energies of individual sign use. Foucault seems to know this very well, for the
cooperation of the individual element in sign synthesis is exactly that which at the
inception of romanticism clouded the transparency of the Enlightenment model
of the sign, and that now, with the suicide of the human being for the benefit of
anonymous systems, again steps into the background of the archive. I want to
bring out this point, which is of great importance, in yet a different manner. A
system like langue or logic can only be transparent (and thus be reduced to an
order that is wholly unrelated to application) if, and as long as, the acts of con-
crete application (the discourses, the propositions) are completely taken up with
the execution of the imperatives of the system: each occurrence of a sign or of
a statement would be the token of an invariant type. If, however, the application
of elements of langue were subject to individual interpretation, then the pure rela-
tion of representation would be clouded: the effects of meaning could never be
anticipated with absolute certainty on the level of the system, they could not be
mastered systematically. This is the standpoint of hermeneutics, that Foucault is
fighting, and for whose expiration he is hoping.
This hope seems to me to be irreconcilable with the premises of Foucaultian
archaeology. First, because it brings into play a teleology of the overcoming of
the subject that is legitimated by nothing except perhaps the individual preference
of the author; second, because the model of a system that remains identical in its
application-as above all Heidegger and Derrida have demonstrated-is com-
pletely unsuited to breaking with the predominance of the subject, insofar as in
this model the dream of the subject to remain transparent in the acts of its
"representing world mastery" climbs its highest Western peak (to this extent Fou-
cault himself is justifiably suspected of scientism); third, because a discourse that
is reduced to langue cannot function as the basis of an "archaeology" that presup-
poses that the gaze with which human knowledge grasps itself is implanted into
it beyond its control: this uncontrollability would be restricted to the rank of
something provisional-which is the same criticism Foucault directed at the hu-
LECTURE 10 G 165
man sciences-if one were to describe that on which knowledge is supposed to
depend as a codified system whose order could be converted into the pure trans-
parency of one and the same knowledge. Thus the dependence of knowledge on
discourse would only be the relative and provisional dependence of immediate
consciousness that Hegel deals with, and of which he demonstrated that it can en-
lighten itself about its presuppositions and thus elevate itself to the status of a no
longer relative and, to this extent, absolute knowledge. Foucaulfs critique of the
human sciences is written to such a large extent from the point of view of "thought
that is made possible again" that his concept of "thought" does not unequivocally
escape a secret ahistoricism or Hegelianism. Fourth, however, Foucault's ar-
chaeology becomes a theory of history only because it theoretically explains the
noneternity of certain discourse-formations, the possibility and the reality of
epistemological breaks. The most effective and, at the same time, most trivial
characteristic of an "epistemological break," consists in destroying the orders of
a discourse, disorganizing it, and putting it back together in a new form that is
not reducible to the old one. If the new discourse is really not reducible to the
game-rules of the old one, then the theory of representation has to be dismissed
in a most radical fashion. To summarize in the form of a thesis, I mean that the
break with the idea that discursive systems are stable and unchangeable in fact
brings Foucault close to what we here are calling "neostructuralism"; what
differentiates him from Derrida and Lacan, for example, is, however, the theoret-
ical impotence vis--vis the mode of Being of this rupture: it actually appears as
if Foucault imagines the succession of epochs (whose "unity" he emphasizes in
quite traditional terms, much as if it were a "spirit of the age") in such a way as
if, as in a theatrical piece, the historical curtain went down between two acts of
representation to rise again in order to make space for a new discursive formation
in which thought is again articulated transparently in signs for itself and for the
scientist. The model of representation is not revised as such, as in Derrida, by
the fact of the instability of all codes: it is just periodically suspended in order
that it might celebrate happy primordial states (Urstnde) in a new clearing of Be-
ing or in a "new thought."
Perhaps it was an awareness of these difficulties that caused Foucault to rethink
his concept of an archaeology of knowledge in 1969 in a methodological study
entitled The Archaeology of Knowledge.
168 LECTURE 11
gumentatively set his position apart from positivism. This implies a theoretical
parti pris whose epistemological self-understanding remains unclear to me. But
let's first look at something in Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge that provides
us with a positive and less problematical response to our other questions men-
tioned earlier.
First of all there is the theme of discontinuity. You recall that in The Order
of Things Foucault declared thinking in discontinuities to be an invention of the
postclassical age, and that he rejected it in an obscure way. He does this because
he himself simultaneously introduces the concept of discontinuity at this central
point in order to contradict a supposedly subject-centric and dialectical model of
history that conceives of history as a continual movement of reappropriation of
a lost origin (for example, Hegel). This model is the (perhaps imaginary) adver-
sary of Foucault, with whom he converses in a fictitious dialogue at the end of
his Archaeology ofKnowledge (19 Iff.). Regardless of whether he is fictitious, we
have to get to know this other thinker in order to be able better to understand Fou-
cault's methodological standpoint. Since in earlier publications he did not play
such a comparatively large role as in The Archaeology of Knowledge, one may
presume the influence of another thinker who is also mentioned at the beginning
of The Archaeology of Knowledge (5), namely, Louis Althusser. In order to be
able positively to throw into relief Marx's Capital over against idealist dialectics
of history and to make it possible to read it as a structuralist analysis of society
avant la lettre, Althusser strictly differentiates the "theoretical praxis" of Marx's
approach from the subject-centric and anthropological praxis of Feuerbach, but
also from thinking in continuities (in Hegel).
The latter pattern of thought he calls ideological, his own (with reference to
Marx) scientific. The former is ideological because it formulates its problems in
the light of an already given and fixed solution (and thus does not ask any real
question). Hegel, for example, thinks of the absolute as the way that leads to it;
this movement is obviously a circular one: it supplies that as its genesis that neces-
sarily had to lead to the aim envisioned from the very beginning, therewith theo-
retically transfiguring the existing.
I say that this posing of the "problem" of knowledge is ideological inso-
far as this problem has been formulated on the basis of its "answer," as
the exact reflection of that answer, i.e., not as a real problem but as the
problem that had to be posed if the desired ideological solution was to
be the solution to this problem. I cannot deal here with this point which
defines the essentials of ideology, in its ideological form, and which in
principle reduces ideological knowledge . . . to a phenomenon of
recognition. In the theoretical mode of production of ideology (which is
utterly different from the theoretical mode of production of science in
this respect), the formulation of a problem is merely the theoretical ex-
pression of the conditions which allow a solution already produced out-
LECTURE 11 G 169
side the process of knowledge because imposed by extra-theoretical in-
stances and exigencies (by religious, ethical, political or other "in-
terests") to recognize itself m an artificial problem manufactured to
serve it both as a theoretical mirror and as a practical justification. (RC,
52)
The entire Western theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie), culminating in
Hegel, is in this sense ideological, namely, justifying in the mirror image of the-
ory a praxis that leads up to it. The space of the problem of knowledge thus turns
out to be a closed space: "a closed space, i.e., a vicious circle (the vicious circle
of the mirror relation of ideological recognition), . . . from the famous'Carte-
sian circle' to the circle of the Hegelian or Husserlian teleology of Reason" (RC,
53).
That his model of history is conceived as a circular movement Hegel himself
emphasized often and gladly.
2
He speaks of "the anticipation that the Absolute
is subject."
3
Hegel, as we know, also liked to speak of the Absolute Spirit as of
a coming-to-itself of something that formerly appeared to be lost in externality.
Already Schelling reproached him for employing the vicious circle, and Marx
was the first to add to this the characteristic of the ideological (circle).
4
To escape
this consequence, Althusser, for his part referring to Foucault's earlier works,
describes "a revolution in the traditional concept of the history of the sciences"
(*C, 44).
We are beginning to suspect, and even to be able to prove in a number
of already studied examples, that the history of reason is neither a lin-
ear history of continuous development, nor, in its continuity, a history
of the progressive manifestation or emergence into consciousness of a
Reason which is completely present in germ in its origins and which its
history merely reveals to the light of day. We know that this type of
history and rationality is merely the effect of the retrospective illusion
of a given historical result which writes its history in the "future an-
terior," and which therefore thinks its origin as the anticipation of its
end. The rationality of the Philosophy of the Enlightenment to which
Hegel gave the systematic form of the development of the concept is
merely an ideological conception both of reason and of its history. The
real history of the development of knowledge appears to us today to be
subject to laws quite different from this teleological hope for the reli-
gious triumph of reason. We are beginning to conceive this history as a
history punctuated by radical discontinuities (e.g., when a new science
detaches itself from the background of earlier ideological formations),
profound re-organizations which, if they respect the continuity of the
existence of regions of knowledge (and even this is not always the
case), nevertheless inaugurate with their rupture the reign of a new
logic, which, far from being a mere development, the "truth" or "inver-
sion" of the old one, literally takes its place, (44)
170 LECTURE 11
In Althusser's relatively clear argumentation one can immediately recognize the
crucial point: one has to describe history as a series of ruptures between which
no teleological Reason establishes continuity, and which are also not held to-
gether by a higher necessity. To be sure, it is amusing to imagine that "today"
anybody would assert such a teleology; Althusser, however, does Hegel the
honor of fighting him as our contemporary, and in occasional lapses Sartre has
to stand in as Hegel's most recent incarnation.
With this we at least have also identified the point of departure of Foucault's
Archaeology of Knowledge: the history that archaeology studies is not one of con-
tinuities in the service of a grounding subject mind; it is rather a series of contin-
gently connected levels of discourse. But the historical epochs are not only dis-
continuous in terms of their succession; they are also, according to Foucault,
discontinuous in themselves. Indeed, precisely in the so-called humanities it was
for a long time customary to speak of the "spirit of the Age of Goethe," for exam-
ple, as if this time span were a homogeneous block:
5
the manifold and differen-
tiated "expression" (this is a favorite concept of the humanities since Dilthey) of
a life feeling or of a spirit. In contrast to this, Foucault justifiably called for cau-
tion and demonstrated just how many unsimultaneities constitute the supposed
homogeneity of epochs, what immense differences crisscross and dismember the
unity of the so-called spirit of the age (Zeitgeist) or "national spirit" (Volksgeisf),
(One will only come to understand that, for example, in the Third Reich "some-
thing archaic" asserts itself when one abandons the totalitarian concept of the her-
meneutical unity of this age and uncovers the differences of the codes that here
have their gloomy rendezvous.) Thus history appears as an interweaving of dis-
parate structures that are not reducible to each other, as the succession of discon-
tinuous "specificities" that in no way are completely absorbed in a terminal con-
cept of "spirit."
The notion of discontinuity assumes a major role in the historical dis-
ciplines. For history in its classical form, the discontinuous was both
the given and the unthinkable: the raw material of history, which
presented itself in the form of dispersed eventsdecisions, accidents,
initiatives, discoveries; the material, which, through analysis, had to be
rearranged, reduced, effaced in order to reveal the continuity of events.
Discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the
historian's task to remove from history. It has now become one of the
basic elements of historical analysis. (AK, 8)
I just spoke of "specificities" into which the former unity of the historical process
or of the spirit of the age dissolves. Foucault used this expression in his inaugural
lecture at the Collge de France in 1970 (L'Ordre du discours).
6
Specificity is here
introduced as a methodological necessity, indeed, as a "principle." To study
historical events in their specificity means not to look at them as cases that fall
LECTURE 11 D 171
under a general concept but rather to consider them in their irreducible singularity
and individuality. The individual, to be sure, is the most stubborn adversary of
the general (for example, of Hegel's spirit) since it, in contrast to the particular,
is not an element of the system: everything individual or singular is not capable
of being subordinated to, and deducible from principles, because it modifies the
principles in a way that is unforeseeable from the standpoint of these principles
themselves. That is an interesting piece of information for our reading of Fou-
cault, and in terms of The Order of Things it seems to be new, or at least to have
a new emphasis. You remember that there Foucault spoke in a rather deductive
manner of the classical and the modern knowledge: a manner that, in the final
analysis, was hardly distinguishable from global concepts like the spirit of the age
or "total history" (AK, 9), or de la longue dure (OD, 57). If the singular event
(levnement singulier) evades generalization in a concept like "epoch," "spirit of
the age," or "total history" because of its irreducible distance from the particular
that is always subordinated to its general law or its rule, then it is obviously partic-
ularly appropriate as an element of an archaeology of knowledge, insofar as the
latter wants precisely to interrupt the smooth flow of continuities and universali-
ties. Foucault actually sees it this way. About archaeology he says:
It has led to the individualization of different series, which are juxta-
posed to one another, follow one another, overlap and intersect, without
one being able to reduce them to a linear schema. Thus, in place of the
continuous chronology of reason, which was invariably traced back to
some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales that are sometimes
very brief, distinct from one another, irreducible to a single law, scales
that bear a type of history peculiar to each one, and which cannot be
reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires, pro-
gresses, and remembers. (AK, 8)
The principle of the individuality of events is supported by the principle of exteri-
ority (extriorit) (229f.). We are so accustomed to thinking of individuality as
a special case of subjectivity (and/or inwardness) that the associability of in-
dividuality and exteriority is confusing on first sight. Actually, Foucault refers
to only one aspect that was already implied in the idea of the singular individual,
namely, its irreducibility to a discursive principle or to a core of meaning of dis-
course. The law of exteriority thus states: "we are not to burrow to the hidden
core of discourse, to the heart of the thought or meaning manifested in it" (229).
The procedure of archaeology is thus exterior because it wants to leave the "se-
ries" of singular events that are not reducible to one another (according to a teleo-
logical principle) "outside" of any totalizing general concept. The theory of his-
tory that Foucault calls Western operates in a manner directly opposite to this,
it itself being based on unpenetrated historical assumptions that are brought to
172 LECTURE 11
light only by archaeology, e.g., the historical maxim that all individual events are
to be totalized in "a system of homogeneous relations," in a
network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, rela-
tions of analogy that show how they symbolize one another, or how
they all express one and the same central core; it is also supposed that
one and the same form of historicity operates upon economic structures,
social institutions and customs, the inertia of mental attitudes, techno-
logical practice, political behaviour, and subjects them all to the same
type of transformation; lastly, it is supposed that history itself may be
articulated into great units stages or phases which contain within
themselves their own principle of cohesion. (9-10)
Foucault here vividly objects both to the principle of the one-dimensional expla-
nation of all historical events on the basis of one type of occurrence, as well as
to the principle of deduction of the events from one structural principle. In this
sense Foucault's archaeology is indeed clearly distinguishable from taxonomical
structuralism in, let's say, Lvi-Strauss.
The fundamental notions now imposed upon us are no longer those of
consciousness and continuity (with their correlative problems of liberty
and causality), nor are they those of sign and structure. They are no-
tions, rather, of events and of series. . . . And now, let those who are
weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call
all this if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them
structuralism. (AK, 230, 234)
Jean Piaget spoke of a "structuralism without structures" in regard to Foucault,
and Foucault himself points in this direction when he comments in retrospect on
his procedure.
For me, the problem was certainly not how to structuralize it, by apply-
ing to the development of knowledge or to the genesis of the sciences
categories that had proved themselves in the domain of language
(langue). My aim was to analyse this history, in the discontinuity that
no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no
pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an
anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the
form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not prom-
ise the return of any dawn. My aim was to cleanse it of all transcenden-
tal narcissism; it had to be freed from that circle of the lost origin, and
rediscovered where it was imprisoned. (203)
Even if we want to concede that Foucault attempts to distinguish himself from
classical structuralism with such bold assertions, we still have to take a closer
look at whether he is really successful at this. Over the course of this lecture we
LHCTURE 11 D 173
will have many occasions to recognize that the appeal to an irreducible individual-
ity is indeed an appropriate tool for putting into question rigid structuralism. For
if the smallest discursive units, the discursive atoms, so to speak, are individuals,
then there is no law that prescribes how one gets from one to another. To be more
precise: If one takes the individual in a strictly inductive fashionas the point
of departure, then one will never arrive at the definitive formulation of a rule. If
that induction, however, remains incomplete, then that in no way means that this
does not occur, indeed must occur, in light of the projection of a unity. For without
the dialectically conceived oppositional concept of the system or of the general one
could not even speak of individuals. If one concedes that each measurement of the
terrain on which the individualities are found is made with foresight to a totality,
as whose particulars these individualities can be identified, then one is still far from
asserting that the projected unity is the firm core of the system from which the in-
dividuals can be derived as elements. The unity is rather a merely projected one,
and it is projected by each individual in a singularly different manner. To this ex-
tent one can absolutely agree with the thesis about the discontinuity and dissemina-
tion (dispersion, dissmination) of history, without at the same time falling into
the other extreme of denying it any unity (as teleological concept) whatsoever.
And this is not at all what Foucault has in mind. Although his concept of the
historical epoch is no longer as monolithic as it was in The Order of Things, he
is still working with unified concepts though in a scarcely intelligible manner.
In the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge he still declares that he does
not want just to dismember the unity of history with an anarchist gesture.
This is not because it is trying to obtain a plurality of histories juxta-
posed and independent of one another: that of the economy beside that
of institutions, and beside these two those of science, religion, or litera-
ture; nor is it because it is merely trying to discover between these
different histories coincidences of dates, or analogies of form and
meaning. The problem that now presents itselfand which defines the
task of a general history is to determine what form of relation may be
legitimately described between these different series; what vertical sys-
tem they are capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dom-
inance exists between them; what may be the effect of shifts, different
temporalities, and various rehandlings; in what distinct totalities certain
elements may figure simultaneously, in short, not only what series, but
also what "series of series" or, in other words, what "tables" it is pos-
sible to draw up. A total description draws all phenomena around a sin-
gle centre a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall
shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a
dispersion. (10)
Even without the definition of the "rule of formation" of discourses, or of the ar-
chive, for that matter, as the space of the dissemination of the "statements," we
174 LECTURE 11
are beginning to understand one thing: archaeology cannot get by without the as-
sumption of a minimal unity and regularity (the latter being a concept that The
Order of Discourse numbers as one of the basic concepts of discourse analysis;
see AK, 299). Otherwise it would not even be a theory, but simply a conceptless
and thoughtless list of singularities that are not the singularities of something (for
example, of a discourse). That discourse is conceived as order is betrayed by the
notion of a vertical system that holds together the different series of the histories
occurring at a certain time. It is obviously in the logic of the metaphor-
perpendicular to the individual histories and penetrates them like a lance. But
even if there were no such supersystem, there still would remain the game-rules
of the individual histories as such. When Foucault first used the term "individual-
ity," he simply meant to attack the thesis that all historical events are deducible
from one global meaning (spirit, origin, subject, system). An epoch much rather
consists of singular events that are not reducible to one another ("irreducible to
a single law"; AK, 8). If these individualities are not reducible to one single and
overriding law, that does not mean that they are not reducible to any law at all,
for example, that of the series to which they belong. In other words, a multiplica-
tion of the codes from which events are deducible is no principal dismissal of the
code model of classical structuralism', with this there are only many subcodes at
work instead of one global code-as is analogically the case in Roland Barthes's
analysis of Balzac's story Sarrasine? The dmarche of multiplying the codes
would, of course, be methodologically unsatisfying. Analysis, after all, (Foucault
underlines this himself) has to make the interconnection among the individual se-
ries intelligible: a table, he says, is a series of series, and thus itself a series that
fundamentally must be able to be described just as exactly as a subseries or an
individual series that is simply contained in the table.
To this extent we can begin to see that Foucaulfs discourse analysis (as we as-
sumed from the beginning) finds itself in close proximity to structuralist text anal-
ysis: its smallest units are not phonemes or morphemes, but phrases. In Foucault
the term "phrases" is replaced by "statements" (noncs). We now want to exam-
ine how Foucault explains to us the mode of Being of a table as a series that con-
tains other series in itself. The title of his inaugural lecture, at any rate, sounds
very similar to the concept of order of textual structuralism.
We just developed certain consequences that arise from Foucault's opting for
discontinuous historiography and came across the concept of the "singular event"
that does not submit to a single general concept. Now we want to address another
question to Foucault's archaeology: how can it still identify itself as a methodi-
cally masterable procedure if it operates under the assumption that the smallest
parts of its system of statements are individuals? (Since Schleiermacher, it has
been hermeneutics that refers to the individual, the adversary of discourse analy-
sis, to the extent that the latter understands itself as a deductive procedure.)
LECTURE 11 175
Our question can also be rephrased in this manner: how is one to imagine what
Foucault calls the system of statements of an epochas a table, as a series of
seriesif it is no structurally describable structure in the emphatic sense?
If we remember at this point what we observed earlier on the occasion of a
discussion of the concept of structure, we will, above all, recall the feature of the
one-dimensional dependence of the event (vnement) on structure: an event is
generatively produced out of the competence a speaker has by virtue of the
"code," as the editors of Saussure's Cours express it. What is obvious is that the
code theory of language can never conceive an event in any other way than as
a simple case of application whose reality can be nothing other than the actualiza-
tion of the laws that exist merely virtually in the "language system." This deduc-
tive dependence of the individual speech act on the law of its formation makes
a science of parole superfluous, for, according to the epistemological premises
of the model, nothing can occur in parole the knowledge of which was not already
assured on the level of langue.
Foucault wants to free his archaeology from this model. Archaeology's basic
conceptdiscourseis located somewhere between structure and event; it is not
subsumable under the "structure/development opposition" (AK, 11). Why not?
We can already imagine the reason: because archaeology deals with discourses
whose elements are not types but rather individuals. If discourses are generalities
in comparison with their elements, then they are at least individualized generali-
ties: systems of a different sort than, say, logic.
What, then, exactly are discourses? Foucault concedes that he uses this central
term in at least three significations.
Lastly, instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of
the word "discourse," I believe that I have in fact added to its meaning:
treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes
as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regu-
lated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements. (AK, 80)
In all three cases, discourses are something like frames, and what they frame are
statements. We would know more about them if we knew what a statement was.
For a system of a higher order grasps itself according to whatever is contained
in it as the set of elements.
Foucault gives a number of negative answers to this question. Statements, he
says, are neither propositions nor phrases nor speech acts (81ff.), although under
certain circumstances they can take on the function of these forms of speech. But
propositions, phrases, and illocutionary acts are elements of closed systems: of
grammar, of logic, of conventionalized speech acts. In regard to these systems
they are, so to speak, "atoms of discourse" (80): the last, undecomposable (in-
dcomposables) elements "isolated and introduced into a set of relations with
other similar elements" (80). Just these conditions are not true for statements as
176 LI LECTURE 11
elements of discourses, because they are individualized, in contrast to the ele-
ments in a taxonomical system.
When one wishes to individualize statements, one cannot therefore ac-
cept unreservedly any of the models borrowed from grammar, logic, or
"analysis." {AK, 84)
"Individualized," in this context, means not foreseeable from the perspective of
structure, contingent with regard to its Being-such. Foucault says this expressly
when he distinguishes an nonc (as element of discourse) from an vnement de
la parole (as element of langue). Language (langue) exists, as we know, only as
a virtual system of the formation of possible statements; discourse analysis, how-
ever has to do with individual and actual statements whose formative origins are
not reducible to those of langue (although they presuppose langue as a necessary
condition) (85-86). The statement thus takes account of the never-to-be-closed
distance that exists between that which could be said according to the rules of lan-
guage (langue), conventions, and correct thinking, and that which is actually
said. The statement maintains this distance on all orders that can be described as
systems in the strict sense of the word (with which we mean rule apparatuses
through whose mastery the singular events can be deductively derived without
changes having occurred). All systems have to ignorethat is their naturethe
individuality and the content specificity of the statement; they cannoteven if
they wanted toaccount for historical singularity and the traditional ballast of a
historically situated speech act.
This brings us to another feature of the statement. We can again introduce it
by means of contrast with the event of a system. For an event of a system it is
essential to be able to be repeated without significant loss of meaning; elements
of systems are, after all, not individuals, but rather types (or schemes) that can
be reproduced as that which they are in any context whatever (even contexts are,
when they are dominated by means of rules, types). In contrast to this, the follow-
ing holds for the statement:
A statement exists outside any possibility of reappearing; and the rela-
tions that it possesses with what it states is not identical with a group of
rules of use. It is a very special relation: and if in these conditions an
identical formulation reappears, with the same words, substantially the
same names in fact, exactly the same sentenceit is not necessarily
the same statement. (AK, 89)
This is a thought that brings Foucault in very close proximity to romantic her-
meneutics. Schleiermacher asserted in the same sense the impossibility that the
statement can be mastered by the (language) system. His basic idea was that from
the standpoint of the system one can only reach the types that have been grasped
and formulated by the system, the particular cases that are encoded according to
LECTURE 11 177
the imperative of the system and that are decoded by the interpreter according
to the inverse of the same rule. What one does not comprehend (for logical rea-
sons) is that which the speaking individual made out of them or, to be more pre-
cise, added to them by means of his manner of using the linguistic possibilities
that is unforeseeable by the system. This unbridgeable distance between the
universal system and the individual statement is the imperishable "individual
component" that manifests itself in style and that one has to guess at, or, for that
matter, pass over by means of an effort of imagination.
You can probably imagine that Foucault would immediately put on the brakes
if he were to hear what conclusions I am drawing here from his thesis. In the ab-
sence of the author the text already does this by differentiating the previously cited
observation about the unrepeatability of the statement. It now introduces a dis-
tinction between statement (nonc) and enunciation (nonciation). Only the lat-
ter, Foucault says, is individual in the strictest sense, it is, in fact (because of the
irreversibility of the flow of time) an unrepeatable enunciative act (acte dnonci-
ation). Before we listen to how Foucault specifically justifies this, we can already
imagine why he has to introduce this distinction. For even if he distinguished dis-
course from system in a satisfactorily strict manner, there still exists an unavoida-
ble analogy between the relation of a system to a type, and the relation that obtains
between discourse and a statement. Since discourse analysis defines itself in strict
contrast to human-scientific hermeneutics of the individual, it must avoid absolute
opposition to the code model. It ultimately must only mollify it, even if I do not
see how this can be accomplished (Dali's painting of the soft clocks, which are,
after all, a surrealist fantasy and to which nothing real can correspond, occurs
to me in this context). If archaeology wants to show itself to be a science (in the
strict sense) of discourse, then it must describe discourses as orders; to be sure,
as orders of a special sort. But one can modify the concept of order as long as
one wishes: the hermeneutical idea of the unforeseeability of the effects of mean-
ing (effets de sens), which is also subscribed to by Derrida and Lacan, is not
reconcilable with the idea of an order. But precisely this, it seems to me, is what
Foucault is trying to accomplish.
After having softened the clocks of the code all too much by means of his
all too harsh contrast between discourse and system he now is concerned with
making them stiff again. He proposes to define the statement according to its func-
tion in discourses at any given time.
One should not be surprised, then, if one has failed to find structural
criteria of unity for the statement; this is because it is not in itself a
unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible
unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and
space. (AK, 87)
178 D LECTURE 11
Note the metaphor of the vertical unification of statements in one and to one dis-
course (a metaphor with which we are already familiar):
as a function that operates vertically in relation to these various units
[logical, grammatical, or locutionary], and which enables one to say of
a series of signs whether or not they are present in it. (86)
I do not want to go into detail and individually discuss the four functional types.
According to Foucault, a statement can be, first, a function of the sort similar to
how a domain of objects or a meaning dimension is disclosed (88ff., esp. 91),
that is, a condition of the possibility of reference and/or significance; second, a
function of the positions that in each instance it grants the subjects of the statement
(92ff.); third, a function of the real or verbal context (98), understood as "an as-
sociated domain" or as "related to a whole adjacent field"/"collateral space" (96,
97), in which it surfaces and which does not overlap with the context rules of syn-
tagmatics or pragmatics (97-98); and fourth, the enunciative function has to
satisfy the condition of having a material existence (lOOff.) which provides it with
a minimal identity.
One can speak of functions only in regard to a I am expressing this grop-
ingly-frame similar to a system that defines its conditions. By way of example,
the failure to greet somebody I know functions as an insult only within an institu-
tional frame of forms of interaction and rules of courtesy. Without such a frame
no action could be recognized as such a function, and thus associated with another
action (or another state of affairs).
What can we conclude from this about the individuality of the statement? You
recall that Foucault denied its exact iterability. He thus drew a radical conclusion
from his distinction between discourses and semiological systems. Now he has
to temper this conclusion, for as function the statement must indeed be identifiable
in some sense. (If it were not, then there would be no analysis of discourses.)
This is the point at which Foucault thinks it is apt to distinguish between state-
ment and (the act of) enunciation. "The enunciation is an unrepeatable event: it
has a situated and dated uniqueness that is irreducible" (101). This nonrepeatabil-
ity has to do with the irreversibility of the time during which a speech act (acte
de parole) occurs; this nonrepeatability, therefore, does not imply that the enunci-
ation does not show "a certain number of constants": grammatical, semantic, logi-
cal, pragmatic types that I can repeat as often as I wish as types (but not at one
and the same time). With the statement it is different.
But the statement itself cannot be reduced to this pure event of enuncia-
tion, for, despite its materiality, it cannot be repeated. . . . And yet
the statement cannot be reduced to a grammatical or logical form be-
cause, to a greater degree than that form, and in a different way, it is
susceptible to differences of material, substance, time, and place. (102)
LECTURE 11 U 179
The statement therefore stands between the exclusive singularity of the enuncia-
tion and the identical and uniform repeatability of a linguistic, logical, or any
other system-related scheme. In various different enunciations one and the same
statement can be expressed; inversely, in different phrases that are repeated with
the same meaning and formed in a grammatically correct manner, a different
statement can have been expressed in each instance.
To guarantee this repeatability one has to have recourse to an order that en-
codes the statement as a scheme: to be sure, an infinitely more sensitive, suscepti-
ble, and alterable one, but a scheme nevertheless. And Foucault indeed draws this
conclusion: first of all, he speaks of an "order of the institution" in which the state-
ments are inscribed and to which they are subordinated as elements identical with
themselves ( 103); and, second, he speaks of a "field of use, in which it [the state-
ment] is placed" (104).
The schemata of use, the rules of application, the constellations in
which they can play a part, their strategic potentialities constitute for
statements afield of stabilization that makes it possible, despite all the
differences of enunciation, to repeat them in their identity; but this same
field may also, beneath the most manifest semantic, grammatical, or
formal identities, define a threshold beyond which there can be no fur-
ther equivalence, and the appearance of a new statement must be recog-
nized. (103)
Institutions and fields of uses are, to be sure, more subtle and more loosely knit
orders than formalized grammars, logics, and taxonomically prepared speech-act
conventions; they are and that is the point here nevertheless orders. If Fou-
cault grants them a "status that is never definitive, but modifiable, relative, and
always susceptible of being questioned" (102), then he could account for this only
within the framework of a hermeneutics of divination that divines systematically
unforeseeable innovations of meaning; within the epistemological framework of
discourse analysis, innovation necessarily rigidifies in the steel casing of institu-
tional dogma that does not put up with any individuals.
We now understand the sense in which Foucault can speak of the unity of an
"archive" (defined as the sum of all discursive regularities that characterize a cer-
tain epoch). Even the concepts "discursive formation" and "rules of formation"
(53) are comprehensible from this perspective, especially if one takes into ac-
count the following definition:
The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexis-
tence, maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discur-
sive division. (38)
Foucault, of course, asks himself again and again: "can one really speak of uni-
ties?" (71), "in what way can we speak of unities and systems?" (72). These ques-
180 U LECTURE 11
tions and doubts, however, at the end of a series of qualifying restrictions, are
affirmed, or rather appeased, with beautiful regularity. And at decisive points the
metaphor of the vertical unit that unifies discourses that are self-enclosed and
different from one another recurs like a leitmotif or like a unifying thread.
In this way, there exists a vertical system of dependences: not all the
positions of the subject, all the types of coexistence between statements,
all the discursive strategies, are equally possible, but only those autho-
rized by anterior levels. (72-73)
And another significant passage:
By system of formation, then, I mean a complex group of relations that
function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular
discursive practice, for such and such an enunciation to be made, for
such and such a concept to be used, for such and such a strategy to be
organized. To define a system of formation in its specific individuality
is therefore to characterize a discourse or a group of statements by the
regularity of a practice. (74)
Especially the emphasis on the "singular individuality" of such a system brings
to mind the theory of style in the hermeneutics of the individual. Style, too, is
indeed a unityeven the unity of a "discursive practice." Moreover, true for style
is also what Foucault says about the unity of discursive practice, namely, that "a
discursive formation, then, does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and
freezes it for decades or centuries; it determines a regularity proper to temporal
processes" (74). Style, too, cannot be anticipated on the basis of the grammatical
system, but for exactly the same reason it is also not formalizable; i.e., it cannot
be inscribed into a generic or institutional order, or even into an order of use.
This small but decisive gulf separates Foucault's appropriation of a "singular in-
dividuality" from all hermeneutical applications of this phrase from Schleier-
macher through to Sartre.
Of course, I am not reproaching Foucault for not being a hermeneutical thinker
(perhaps he would not have so very much to criticize in Schleiermacher); at this
point we are not yet in a position to draw such a comparison. Rather, I reproach
him for the fact that his emancipation of discontinuity, of the epistemological rup-
ture and of individuality, in the final analysis subordinates itself to the well-known
code model in its somewhat more moderate form as the dogma of institutions. We
therefore can pass the judgment that Foucault is a thinker at the border between
classical structuralism and neostructuralism. With structuralism he shares think-
ing in orders and in relations of parts and whole (statement/discourse, for exam-
ple); with neostructuralism he shares the interest in a transformation of orders of
the sort that no longer serves the preservation of units of meaning, but rather their
multiplication.
LECTURE 11 181
In the years of research since The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault was
constantly searching for a theoretical foundation for his archaeology. Above all,
he wanted to know-and this question was left open in his bookwhether the
authority that lends discourses and archives their order could not be concretized
and named. His inaugural lecture at the Collge de France formulated precisely
this question and opened up the field of studies in which Foucault was subse-
quently involved. They are subsumed under the phrase "theory of power."
I can only give a hint about this direction. The Order of Discourse evolves con-
sequences from the (not unfamiliar) hypothesis that society controls the produc-
tion of discourses by means of a certain number of mechanisms of exclusion:
through prohibitions and restrictions, for example, which can extend to the ob-
ject, to the context, as well as to the speaker of the discourse; or alternatively,
it controls them through the banishment of madness from the system of (medical
and spiritual) normality or reason (raison); finally, it controls them through the
"opposition between the true and the false" that puts sanctions on wrong thinking,
whereby the criterion of "within the true" (223-24) is based on an "institutional
support" (218). To this is connected a criticism of rationality on a Nietzschean
basis. In all forms of rationality regardless of whether as "will to truth," as "will
to knowledge," or as "goodwill" of morality-one can discern a will that itself is
by no means rational and whose essence Nietzsche characterized as the will to
power. To be sure, the thought of the driving desire that operates below the sur-
face of "value-free" rationality is put under sanctions itself (it belongs to the game-
rules of rationality that it should assert its autonomy); the archaeologist who steps
down into this subterranean level of value-free thinking, meanwhile, rediscovers
there Nietzsche's will to overpowering-the will to conserve and intensify life-
supported mainly by a reading of the Genealogy of Morals, the Bible of neostruc-
turalist theory of power.
8
We will come across it again when we examine Deleuze
and Guattari's contribution to the topic of our lecture series. For today I am sa-
tisfied with demonstrating that with the (re)discovery of the will to power (which,
in the internalized form of a will to order and to truth/reason, cuts back all dis-
courses), the principle is simultaneously found that lends discourses that mysteri-
ous unity that Foucault again and again identifies.
With this hypothesis Foucault can simultaneously provide an answer to our
question that he would have had to leave unanswered during his work on The Ar-
chaeology of Knowledge, namely, whether the subordination of discourse to a
unity and order (let's say, its taxonomization) does not stand in contradiction to
his opting for the semantic-pragmatic unconquerability of discourse. Foucault
will now give us the following answer to this (and therewith he prepares the
breakthrough into the theoretical domain of neostructuralism): this is indeed the
case, but this is not a natural characteristic of discourses as such, but rather the
effect of their mutilation by the systems of exclusion that the will to power-
beneath the mask of rationalization-introduces into them.
182 U LbCl UKt i i !
This conclusion can easily be understood, and I do not want to challenge the
fruitfulness it demonstrated in Foucault's more recent works, especially in his
Surveiller et punir. It undoubtedly also has a political dimension in that it throws
the mechanisms of exclusion, by means of which instituted power in all its
manifestations gets rid of its enemies, into a brighter light, thus making them visi-
ble and combatable. Foucault's political engagement leaves no doubt about the ap-
plicability and significance of his theory for practical action. Nevertheless, we
will have to ask some questions about this most sophisticated form that his thought
has attained.
Lecture 12
In the previous lecture we were able to provide only a brief look at the theoretical
work of Michel Foucault in the seventies. What we were able to determine was
that at this time he sought to explain the phenomenon of the "order" in which dis-
courses subsist by turning to Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of power. It is not a
natural feature of discourses that joins the set of statements (noncs) contained
by them into the unity of an order. It is rather the mechanisms of exclusion, of
prohibition, and of internal disciplining by means of which the will to power trims
back their natural wildness. We saw that this hypothesis provides both an il-
luminating explanation of the unification of the discursive field, and can also serve
as the basis for a political engagement against the "dispositives of power."
Nevertheless, some questions seem to remain unanswered and we want to for-
mulate them now, before going on to another topic. The first question concerns
the criterion that allowed Foucault to draw from his theory of power precisely
those consequences that he in general drew, and whose moral engagement we ap-
preciate (although Foucault himself would certainly never speak of "moral," or
of "engagement"). In other words, in whose namethrough an appeal to whom
or what-can he announce a call to arms against the power that manifests itself
in exclusion? One cannot overthrow existing conditions or orders without refer-
ring to a valuein opposition to these realitiesin whose name the existing falls
prey to criticism. This "contrafactual" value, moreover, would have to be in the
service of an alternative order, but an order nevertheless, for it is impossible (and
scarcely stimulating, even as a pure fantasy) to engage oneself against an order
in the name of pure, abstract nonorder. For a nonorder would be a completely
\Q1
184 D LECTURE 12
characterless formation, similar to the mythical Tohuwabohu, or chaos, in which
nothing could be distinguished and in which, among other things, one could iden-
tify neither happiness, desire, freedom, nor justice. (The thought of an un-
structured chaos contradicts, by the way, the rules of the game of semiological
differentiation, and thus the theoretical foundation of both structuralism and neo-
structuralism; remember Saussure's characterization of unstructured thought as
a "shapeless and indistinct mass"; CGL, 111.)
In fact, Foucault's critique of order is directed not against some particular or-
der (such as late-capitalist order) but against order as order, i.e., as a system of
exclusions as such. When the attack on order as order becomes universal, it is
no longer directed at any order in particular; i .e., the targets of the attack become
indifferent and interchangeable.
1
This fight against order is very similar to the
"gratuitous act" of some of the surrealists, e.g., blind flailing (without principles)
or running amok. That my assessment is not overstated is supported by the fact
that the guardians of the state can look upon this new sort of enemies of order
with relative calm; since they are against everything (and not against this or that
in particular), they are in the final analysis preservers of the state (in the case of
Sartre it was different). This is a danger that, in my opinion, becomes exponen-
tially greater in the texts of some of Foucault's students especially in the more
recent works of Deleuzeand which I will respond to as soon as I examine these
texts. The other danger is that Foucault fails to take into account that political
fights were never directed against order as idea, but always against a certain state
of order that enslaves, deprivileges, and violates the subject; every political en-
gagement stands in the service of an alternative order and an alternative organiza-
tion of our social interchange, but never in the service of disorder or nonorder:
a concept that even with the utmost effort of our imagination cannot be filled with
content, because it is and remains "amorphous" when one reflects on it. Chaos
was never the wish-fulfillment dream of the political revolutionary, and I do not
believe that will ever be the case.
Connected with this is that Foucault speaks ambiguously and misleadingly
about the order of discourse as a net of mechanisms of repression. On the one
hand, one cannot even describe discursive formations and regularities unless the
will to power in some way arranged (i.e., structured) them in the form of a sys-
tem; on the other hand, describability, on the presupposition of which Foucault's
work is based, is nothing other than the precipitate of violent acts on the part of
the will to power. Is then archaeology itselfsimilar to what it calls the order of
reasonin alliance with the will to power? The fact that it rejects an extradiscur-
sive center of orders something like a transcendental condition of possibility for
the "orderliness" of ordersas a human-scientific notion speaks in favor of this.
But what could the will to power be, if not a ground for the possibility of dis-
courses that itself is not discursive, a ground that forces the manifoldness of hu-
man activities and thoughts into the unity of a structure or of an institution (in a
LECTURE 12 185
structurally homologous manner to Kant's self-consciousness that imprints the
unity of its categories on the manifoldness of empirical reality)?
An isolated reflection in The Archaeology of Knowledge, which allows some
room for such questions, points in this direction.
Behind the visible faade of the system, one posits the rich uncertainty
of disorder; and beneath the thin surface of discourse, the whole mass
of a largely silent development {devenir): a "presystematic" that is not
of the order of the system; a "prediscursive" that belongs to an essential
silence. Discourse and system produce each otherand conjointly-only
at the crest of this immense reserve. (AK, 76)
To this conjecture Foucault responds that when the archaeology of knowledge
speaks of the conditions of possibility for discursive orders, these conditions of
possibility are always of the nature of discourse itself. Discourses are therefore
inescapable.
Behind the completed system, what is discovered by the analysis of for-
mations is not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet uncap-
tured state; it is an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of
multiple relations. Moreover, these relations cannot be the very web of
the textthey are not by nature foreign to discourse. They can certainly
be qualified as "prediscursive," but only if one admits that this predis-
cursive is still discursive, that is, that they do not specify a thought, or
a consciousness, or a group of representations which, a posteriori, and
in a way that is never quite necessary, are transcribed into a discourse,
but that they characterize certain levels of discourse, that they define
rules that are embodied as a particular practice by discourse. One is not
seeking, therefore, to pass from the text to thought, from talk to si-
lence, from the exterior to the interior, from spatial dispersion to the
pure recollection of the moment, from superficial multiplicity to pro-
found unity. One remains within the dimension of discourse. (76)
If discourses are inescapable, then the anarchical option, in the polemics against
those mechanisms that force the supposedly wild acts of speech into the Procrus-
tean bed of a discourse, becomes unintelligible: discourses are alterable, and they
constantly alter themselves as "singular practices," but the goal of these transfor-
mations will never be extradiscursive or a condition of disorder.
Since The Order of Discourse makes the will to power responsible for the task
of unification that creates discourses and, on the other hand, cannot hold up any-
thing extradiscursive against the order and violence manifested in discourses,
the theory becomes contradictory in itself: the will to powerin the guise of
rationality is an instrument of torture (la Raison, c'est la torture), its work is
the institutions, the disciplines, the prohibitions, and commandments that con-
strain wild acts of speech in orders; on the other hand, on the basis of the
186 LECTURE 12
language-theoretical premises of Foucault's work it would be absurd to believe
that one could transgress discourse and arrive at a state that would not itself be
discourse. Thus we see that Foucault has nothing to hold up against the om-
nipresence of power that he unmasks: his theory becomes willy-nilly fatalistic,
just as Nietzsche's theory, which celebrates the will to power with a "tremendous
and unlimited saying of Yea and Amen" and turns to amor fati as a final conse-
quence, is fatalistic.
2
This consequence, however, could have been avoided-but on other theoreti-
cal foundations than those with which Foucault operates. I can only sketch the
alternative here: it becomes more visible in that which we already saw, and will
yet see, on the occasion of an examination of Derrida's theory of discourses and
signs. Foucault distinguishes other ("internal," internes) "systems for the control
and delimitation of discourse" (220) from the external (externes) mechanisms of
repression that constitute discourses. They are called "internal" "where discourse
exercises its own control" (220). Foucault numbers among them, above all, the
task of textual commentary that, as it were, in the form of secondary texts,
repeats, consolidates, and seeks to restrict the meaning of primary texts to the
reproduction of their authentic original meaning (220ff.). A second internal con-
trol procedure consists in the institution of authorship (221ff.), which seeks to
bind the discourse to the writing or speaking subjectivity of an author as its "unify-
ing principle in a particular group of writings of statements, lying at the origins
of their significance, at the seat of their coherence" (221).
Commentary limited the hazards of discourse through the action of an
identity taking the form of repetition and sameness. The author princi-
ple limits this same chance element through the action of an identity
whose form is that of individuality and the /. (222)
The third internal principle of arrangement is the becoming-"discipline" of the
discourses: on the one hand, their subordination to institutions (academic, educa-
tional, political, medical, military, etc.) (224n\); on the other hand, their dis-
ciplining by means of socioepistemic organizational conditions and "theoretical
fields" (223: "certain typefs] of theoretical field[s]") in which a branch of scholar-
ship (Wissenschaft) can unfold at a given time. Thus the paradigm of evolutionary
biology, for example, deprives certain taxonomical discourses, which deal with
the mode of Being of life, of their basis for existence; certain epistemological
horizons define at the outset the space for possible truths and untruths: "In short,
a proposition must fulfil some onerous and complex conditions before it can be
admitted within a discipline; before it can be pronounced true or false it must be,
as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, 'within the true' " (224).
I do not want to follow up on the often inspiring observations Foucault makes
about these "internal" principles of limitation: the brilliant simplicity with which
The Order of Discourse presents them requires no commentary. I want rather to
LECTURE 12 D 187
put my finger on the point I had in mind when I said that the fatalistic consequence
of Foucault's idea of the inescapability of order is not necessary. Foucault speaks
of the internal rules that dominate the constitution of discourses (among which
he, surprisingly enough, does not even count the grammatical rules that make
speech possible and that, indeed, also exercise internal restrictions, even on the
wildest manner of speech), and behind which stands the will to power, as a discur-
sive policy ("if one obyed the rules of some discursive 'policy' "; 224). The dis-
cipline, the paradigm, the epistemological framework are such policing authori-
ties of control in the production of discourses: "[Discipline] . . . fixes its limits
through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of
the rules" (224; translation modified).
Behind this thesis-which in its context is entirely intelligible-there seems to
me to stand a false model of (discursive) grammar or of order that again brings
me back to the idea that Foucault's thinking stops short of the threshold of neo-
structuralism. To be sure, his newly introduced theory of power provided a plau-
sible explanation for the possible unity and orderedness of discourses. More-
over, it gives an inkling of an anarchical space of unregulated speech-beyond
discourses that archaeology, however, cannot have access to because it cannot
conceive of extradiscursive speech and action (and thus it remains faithful to the
linguistic turn). It thus remains subjugated to the repressive effect of the will to
knowledge itselfas theory, which it is.
This is a paradox that Foucault cannot escape. It has to do with the fact that
he can only think of the effects of a symbolical order as determination of the
events by its underlying structure. Only this conception makes the comparison
of the discursive discipline with the police state possible. In reality, the talk of
the "prison house of language" (which goes back to Nietzsche) is theoretically un-
tenable. Discursive orders, rather, are unstable and uncontrollablewe saw this
in our initial glance at Derrida's workfor internal reasons: first of all, because
the relationship between linguistic law and speech act is not one of simple deriva-
tion, but rather presupposes the application of a hypothesis and thus a free in-
terpretation; second, because the view that discourses consist of stable and identi-
cal elements can only be justified with reference to an extrastructural principle
of organization, but at this point, however, it would escape the basic law of lin-
guistic differentiation; third, because a structure without such a principle of unity
has to be conceived as dcentrai and thus could not govern and limit the free play
of the formation of differences by means of a law. To be sure, I do not wish to
overlook that Foucault depicts such a law in an unfavorable light. It is neverthe-
less true that he cannot imagine discourses without such disciplining and determi-
nation. The talk about "an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation
of the rules" (224) borrows extensively from the code model of understanding,
with the rejection of which neostructuralism as a theoretical movement actually
commences.
188 LECTURE 12
For Derrida, as we saw, this rejection is self-evident. For him there is no ex-
ternal and no internal law that could determine the course of a "discursive praxis"
at the outset, not even the police code.
3
The police always stay behind the scenes
of speech because each adherence to a rule of discourse can amount to its uncon-
trollable transformation.
If the police [are] always waiting in the wings, it is because conventions
are by essence violable and precarious in themselves. (LI, 250)
Another passagealso taken from his answer to Searle- seems to reply ironically
to Foucault's police metaphor.
Once iterability has established the possibility of parasitism, of a certain
fictionality altering at onceSec too [aussi sec] the system of (il- or
perlocutionary) intentions and the systems of ("vertical") rules or of
("horizontal") conventions, inasmuch as they are included within the
scope of iterability; once this parasitism or fictionality can always add
another parasitic or fictional structure to whatever has preceded it
what I elsewhere designate as a "supplementary code" [supplment de
code] everything becomes possible against the language-police; for ex-
ample "literatures" or "revolutions" that as yet have no model. Every-
thing is possible except for an exhaustive typology that would claim to
limit the powers of graft or of fiction by and within an analytical logic
of distinction, opposition, and classification. (243)
The "order of discourse" is thus no phantom, but its status of Being is pure possi-
bility, whereas its reality is the permanent (not fetterable or thwartable by any
will to power) transformation and new creation of constituted meaning.
With this look at Foucaulfs power-theoretical foundation of his "archaeology,"
we have closed one chapter of our lectures on neostructuralism and opened a new
one. The completed chapter was devoted to the theory of history; the new chapter
will treat the theory of the subject.
You will certainly object that my report was very incomplete. I concentrated
almost entirely on Michel Foucault and only occasionally presented comparable
positions from Louis Althusser. Yet poststructuralism has taken up other posi-
tions (I am thinking of what Maurice Godelier, for example, has written about
the phenomenon of history, and of Louis Althusser's suggestion that the "struc-
tural causality" be conceived as a relationship between discontinuous structures
of which one dominates "as the final authority").
I gladly admit to all this and defend my approach with a reminder about the
agreement we made at the outset of our lectures, namely, to limit ourselves to
an explanation of the phenomenon of neostructuralism (and thus to use classical
structuralist approaches only as a foil).
4
Furthermore, we agreed not to have "po-
LECTURE 12 D 189
sitions of poststructuralism" stand for review in a rhapsodie series, but rather to
enter into a philosophizing examination of what neostructuralism actually and es-
sentially is. In doing this we only wanted to concern ourselves with authors and
individual works insofar as they are indispensable (and, moreover, practical) for
the explanation of intellectual attitudes. It was not my intention to report on the
intellectual biography of Michel Foucault, and even a glance at his investigations
about the birth of the clinic, the history of madness, and the penal code, as well
as the archaeology of sexuality, all of which are abundant in material, was beyond
the boundaries within which these lectures are intentionally defined. On the ex-
ample of Foucault and Althusser I wanted to give you an idea of what neostruc-
turalism's philosophy of history accomplishes and what it objects to in the philos-
ophy of history of the human sciences. For even neostructuralism submits (as far
as I can tell) to an accepted game-rule of philosophical discourse that says that
the explanation of a phenomenon, as it was transmitted by an earlier manner of
thought, may be rejected only if simultaneously a different and better explanation
of the same phenomenon is offered. I believe that this demand does justice to Fou-
cault's self-understanding, for his archaeology, indeed, seeks to send a tremor
through a century-old discursive practice, but also to replace it completely with
a new thinking.
This is also true for the explanation of the phenomenon of subjectivity. You
noticed, even before I had the chance to broach this subject as such, what an ex-
traordinary weight the texts discussed so far have lent it. You know or imagine
at the same time that this interest is critical, or even negative. "The subject," what-
ever this might be, is out of the question as the point of departure for the "new
thinking": it appears to be the last retreat of a thinking that is outdated and back-
ward, and which it now has to remove from the center of philosophizing (i.e.,
decentralize) in order for that which Foucault all too simply called "thought" and
(somewhat more intricately) a "felicitous positivism" to be possible again ("let us
say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical
mood is one of felicitous positivism" (AK, 234).
The challenge of the concept of the subject thus grows organically out of neo-
structuralism's philosophy of history: "the subject" designates the point of depar-
ture of premodern (for example, Cartesian), and particularly of modern (for
example, Kantian, Fichtean, Sartrean) thought. If the archaeology of modern
knowledge comes down to the subject's euthanasia to thought in the void left by
the disappearance of the subject-then it obviously enters the space in which
thought will be "possible again," namely, an entirely anonymous thinking (like
that of mythology): a thinking that no longer is the predicate of a subject, as in
the work of Kant, and which only makes sense in connection with the first-person
singular pronoun (as that "I am thinking that has to be able to accompany all my
ideas": I-ness and thought are coextensive concepts in this formula).
Before I document this universal challenge of the concept of the subject with
190 D LECTURE 12
names of individual neostructuralist authors and with texts and examine it in de-
tail, I want to draw a rough sketch of the position of these attacks and also discuss
it in an intellectual-historical fashion. Despite the fact that neostructuralism likes
to designate itself in aporetical metaphors as a new thought-as thought after the
decline of the West-it still fails to escape a tradition that anteceded it by decades,
indeed by centuries. The decline of the West is a thought that accompanies mod-
ern times like a thoroughbass, and that has become a main subject of philosophy
at the very latest since the critical turn (Kant, Fichte). "The West" becomes a col-
lective singular in romanticism; Hegel's philosophy conceives itself as the com-
pletion and conclusion of Western thought; Nietzsche and Heidegger prepare the
advent of a thought on this side or beyond the "grammar" that had determined
Western discourses.
Simultaneously, what the neostructuralists will call the "decentering of the
subject" is prepared. Heidegger had reproached Western and particularly modern
thought for a step-by-step repression of the thought of Being in favor of the fan-
tasy of a "self-empowerment of the subject." (We cannot, of course, strictly speak
of a "reproach": it is rather a matter of a diagnosis of the Western direction of
thought founded in the "history of Being," a diagnosis that, however, does not al-
ways escape the speech act of the moral judgment, as we could document on the
example of Foucault.) The history that Heidegger narrates to us from Being and
Time through to his last dark and laconic texts tells us the following: the human
being-or (to burst the human-scientific/humanistic fetter of the expression "hu-
man being") Dasein is that kind of being that in its Being is concerned with its
Being. This inquiring circular movement allows Dasein a self-relation whose
mode of Being Heidegger calls hermeneutic. "Hermeneutic" means "related to in-
terpretation" (Deutung, Interpretation, Auslegung). Relating itself to itself-in-its-
Being, Dasein attempts an interpretation of its Being and of Being in general. We
know how this interpretation (as Heidegger reconstructs it) turned out: in the
Western tradition from Parmenides to Sartre's phenomenology (the last contem-
porary with whom, aside from the mere mentioning of names, Heidegger took
issue), Dasein persistently posed the question of Being in the form "What is Be-
ing?" To inquire about what a thing is means to inquire about its essence ("Being-
what-it-is" and "essence" [Latin, quidditas] are, as the idealists already pointed
out, words of a similar origin in German). "Essence" in Greek means oooia, but
in such a way that it at the same time means "Being":
5
Essence-Being in absolute
possibility of being identical. That Heidegger, furthermore, is of the opinion that
the "meaning of Being" (that is, the signification as which the term "Being" is dis-
closed at any given time in the history of European thought) unveils itself within
the horizon of time (as having-been, presence, and becoming-Being), one can
state more precisely by saying that ooia interprets Being from the vantage
point of being-present, i.e., of presence, of perceptibility, and of graspability
(7rapovoia). Thus, over the course of centuries Being-as-Being (T V f\ v) got
LECTURE 12 D 191
out of sight and came to coincide with essence: Being-what-it-is and presence.
Being was interpreted as "being-ness"; and as totality of being it became object:
something that stands over against representing and acting in order to be manipu-
lated by it.
Under the conditions of this positioning of the epistemic switch, the place of
the subject is conceived from the very beginning, as it were, as a vacant position.
"Subject" designates that which executes the activity of re-presenting and of ac-
tion and which is something like the owner of the same. This owner also has a
relation of objectivity and presence to itself: it represents itself in its Being as that
which it is: as sovereign self-consciousness that "presences" itself and all other
beings (as Heidegger says). Heidegger conceived this process, which leads from
the repression of Being-as-Being to the idea of re-presenting, as the history of the
gradual self-empowerment of subjectivity. In his "archaeology" the central evi-
dence is, first, Parmenides' identification of Sein ("to be," "Being") (as anonymous
infinitive: TO evai) and Seiendes (being) (the present participle of Sein: T V)
as the correlative of thought (vosv) whereby, by the way, voev, similar to
eisvai (to know) and #ecopev (to observe intellectually), was originally an ex-
pression taken from the semantic sphere of sensual perception and took on the
signification of a nonsensual perceiving, as in "thought," only by means of this
Western reinterpretation. Thus Being, narrowed down to being, became the ob-
ject of a necessary thoughta switching point that is completely codified in the
Platonic idealization of being as eo. The second major evidence Heidegger
cites for his thesis of the successive empowerment of subjectivity is the becoming-
subject of idea (at the latest) in Descartes, and finally-the third state of the
repression of Beingthe absolutization of the subject as "subject-object" (i.e., as
unity of object and thought) in German idealism, above all in Johann Gottlieb
Fichte. Here the thesis of Parmenides that "Being and thought, however, are the
same" arrives at its goal; the West completes itself by sublating its origin through
thought. (This occurs in the chapter entitled "The Doctrine of Being" in Hegel's
Logic, which explicitly refers to Parmenides: what appeared to be "Being," turns
out to be "essence," thought through in the mind and in truth; and essence turns
out to be a necessary moment in the dialectical self-relation of what Hegel calls
"idea.")
The brilliance of this "archaeology" of European knowledge is undisputed, and
nobody will deny that the evidence Heidegger presents has great explanatory
force. Yet we still have to ask ourselves whether the history Heidegger tells us
is correct in the way he tells it. The kernel idea of Heidegger's "history of Being"
is the thesis that Western thought comes down to a gradual "subjectivization" of
Being. And in fact, one can and may characterize philosophy, at least modern phi-
losophy (and within it above all German philosophy), as thought deriving from
the unity of the subject, //"there was one theme that gave profile and coherence
to thought in modern times, it was the role this one and central thought of the sub-
192 D LECTURE 12
ject played in it. To this extent one cannot maintain that Heidegger and the neo-
structuralists were focusing on a marginal theoretical outpost.
Heidegger's reconstruction of the path of Western thought- neostructuralism's
theory of the subject relies primarily on it-seems, nevertheless, incorrect, or at
least one-sided. I will summarize the points at which I wish to give notice of my
contradiction. As soon as I turn to a more extensive examination of Lacan, Der-
rida, and Deleuze, I will provide the necessary differentiations.
1. Heidegger thinks of subjectivity, as it were, as the owner of the representa-
tions that reduce Being to the sum of being, i.e., of occurring objects. In its ex-
treme manifestation-in Fichte-the subject then appears as power over beings,
as that which "posits" itself and world. Subjectivity thus fuses with sovereignty,
it inherits the capacity formerly attributed to God to be ground of itself. A being
that owes its Being only to itself and not to the relation to something Other may
justifiably be called absolute {omnibus relationibus absolution).
Now it can be demonstrated that the modern idea of the absoluteness of subjec-
tivity is ambiguous. Looked at more closely, it is far from being one-sidedly
directed toward mere self-empowerment which would be continued in taking
power over the world. Even in Descartes the cogito can be explained only on the
basis of the relationships it has with itself; however, it is not yet capable of
grounding its own Being through this self-relation (and he refers to the divine
guarantee). In other words, "The self-relation of conservation (conservatio sui)
together with its reflection, is what it is not through itself, and thus it evokes the
question about its ground."
6
This ground can no longer be an external ground un-
der the conditions of the epistemic framework of the philosophy of self-Being;
it must be a matter of an unfathomableness, the experience of which the subject
makes in the attempt of identifying itself with itself, and thus in its own internal
sphere. "Thus the experience that self-Being, by virtue of an inner principle, is
related to itself and only to itself, has as its complement not only the certainty
of being nevertheless from an unfathomable ground, but also the knowledge that
this ground remains inaccessible to it. The more the thought of self-relation and
self-determination of the human being was developed in modern philosophy, the
more the other side of the same consciousness had to become its theme."
7
This
experience that the subject of modern philosophy experiences itself as not-being-
ground-of-its-own-subsistence
8
has never been more clearly articulated in mod-
ern times than in the thought of early romanticism, in the philosophy of Schelling
(with his coinage of the term "unprereflective Being"), and of Fichte (with his idea
of the "absolute dependence" of the subject). According to Heidegger, this is the
age of the greatest obscuration of Being and of the greatest subjectivization. In-
deed, Fichte reinterpreted the absolute subject, at the very latest around 1800,
as a being that can account for its essence and for its deeds (in short, for its mode
of Being), but not for the fact that it is. To the romantic philosophers and Schell-
ing, self-consciousness presented itself from the very beginning as a relation that
LECTURE 12 D 193
comes about only on the precondition of a grounding identity that escapes the play
of relations as such. What Lacan will call the assujettisation du sujet is, there-
fore, not a new thought, but the renewed taking up of a specifically modern idea
that extends from Descartes and Spinoza in a continuous line through Rousseau,
Fichte, Schelling, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer to Darwin,
Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, all of whom, although with different accentuation,
allow for the grounding of the self-conscious subject in something that itself is
not conscious and on which it depends absolutely (and which is its internal, not
its external, ground).
2. The second objection relates to Heidegger's thesis that in modern times the
owner of the "capacity for representation" was specified as the "subject." This the-
sis states I am only repeating it in a new light that the subject fuses with the
capacity for representation in such a way that in the end (since Kant and Reinhold;
actually, since Leibniz) we can say that there is no representation that is not the
representation of a subject who has it (and whose representation it is). All acts
of representation (I am using this expression in the Kantian sense, meaning all
mental and volitional acts, and all acts of perception) are acts of I-ness, of the
"transcendental synthesis of apperception." Kant's monstrous expression, which
can be translated simply with self-consciousness, is nevertheless illuminating. It
refers back to the doctrine of perception that now is also being applied to the
knowledge the I has of itself. The knowledge the I has of itself is an analogue of
the "representation" (perception/apperception) one can have of external objects.
In other words, the I is immediately objectifiable to itself.
Looked at through the spectacles of Heidegger's "fundamental ontology," to
"re-present" means "to put something in front of oneself," to "make an object out
of something" in order to dominate it through the power of consciousness. Thus,
in every act of representing two poles can be distinguished. If, then, the I is also
thought of according to the model of representationand that was already true
for Descartes's cogito sum then the phenomenon of self-consciousness is con-
ceived as bipolar: as the relation of one thing to itself. Such a relation, insofar
as it is accompanied by consciousness, is called reflection. Self-consciousness is
conceived as reflection (as an explicit placing itself in front of itself) in the
epistemic framework of "representation." The tense of reflection is the present.
As that which has itself constantly before its own eyes, self-consciousness is
simultaneously both "something objective" and "something present," just as that
which representation perceives (the things in the world) is always something pres-
ent.
9
Self-consciousness thus is not only reflection, but it is also self-presence:
"Being-alongside-itself."
Is that really correct? You will see that Foucault, and particularly Derrida, but
also Lacan, always describe and criticize the phenomenon of self-consciousness
as self-presence. If self-consciousness, however, was not conceived as self-
194 LECTURE 12
presence by the influential thinkers of modernism, then this criticism becomes ob-
solete, or, to be more precise, it is deprived of its historical object.
It is true that Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and after them many others (for example,
Husserl) actually described self-consciousness as reflection: as a representing-
itself whose effect was the knowledge the I had about itself. It is also true that
they thought of self-consciousness as a Being-present-to-itself. That is particu-
larly true for Husserl, to whom Derrida devoted his first works.
It is not true, however, for early romanticism and not, for example, for Fichte,
Franz Brentano, Hans Schmalenbach, or Sartre. These thinkers explicitly re-
jected the model of reflection of knowledge as insufficient when it is a matter of
describing the experience that consciousness has of itself. And they did this with-
out exception along the lines of the following argument. If the experience of self-
consciousness were a result of self-reflection, then the following process would
have to take place: the I, still without knowledge of itself, turns to itself during
the process of representation and becomes aware of: itself. But how is it supposed
to register this insight if it has not already previously had a concept of itself?
10
For the observation of something (even if it is of me) will never provide me with
information about that particular characteristic of my object that makes evident
that it is /whom I am observing. I must rather have already had this insight, and
I now bring it into play. (Only if I already know myself can the mirror tell me
that it is / who is looking at him/herself. And reflection is precisely such a mir-
ror.) If I gain this insight, and this with apodictic evidence, then it cannot have
been the result of a reflection, for (as Novalis says) "what reflection finds, seems
to have been there already."
11
In other words, that it is / whom I make present
in the act of reflection of self-mirroring cannot be the product of cognition; it
must rather be the result of recognition, the reidentification of something already
known: in this instance, of myself. Ifthisisthecaseand it is the casethen self-
consciousness has to be explained differently than on the basis of reflection,
namely, as a Being-familiar-with-itself prior to all reflection which since Novalis
is characterized as a nonpositing self-consciousness.
12
Holderlin's friend Isaac
von Sinclair spoke of the "athetical,"
13
Schleiermacher of the "immediate" self-
consciousness: the "immediate" self-consciousness must not be confused with the
"reflected self-consciousness where one has become an object to oneself."
14
If
self-consciousness, according to this, is not and cannot be grounded on presenc-
ing, then what becomes of the view that with the philosophy of self-consciousness
(and thus, in short, with Fichte) the will to self-empowerment of subjectivity
reached its Western zenith? The question is a rhetorical one: this thesis by
Heidegger is deprived of its object and at very best has to be reworked or revised.
3. Our third objection is closely related to the second. It asserts two things:
(a) self-consciousness was not conceived as I~ness by all significant philosophers
of modern times, for example, not by Novalis, not by Schleiermacher, and not
by Sartre. Where Novalis is concerned, I refer to my book on Das Problem "Zeit"
LECTURE 12 195
in der deutschen Romantik;
15
Schleiermacher expressly emphasized in the pas-
sage cited earlier that under the term "immediate self-consciousness" he under-
stands only the familiarity of consciousness with itself, not the knowledge of an
/as the owner of consciousnessabout itself.
16
Consciousness is thus aper-
sonal, it is not the consciousness of an I. The I, according to Schleiermacher, is
generated as a by-product, or in the background of a reflection (it is not an inhabi-
tant of the nonpositing self-consciousness). "We have no representation of the I
without reflection"; "self-consciousness and I relate to one another as the immedi-
ate to the mediate."
17
Or another passage: the "immediate self-consciousness
feeling . . . is 1) different from reflected self-consciousness I, which ex-
presses the identity of the subject only in the difference of moments, and thus is
based on the summary of the moments that is always mediated; 2) different from
sensation (Empfindung), which is the subjective and personal element in a given
moment, and thus posited by means of affect."
18
In his famous essay La Tran-
scendance de UEgo, Sartre says almost the same thing: prereflective self-
consciousness is both I-less and apersonal.
19
The only philosopher from the spec-
trum of ncostructuralism who took cognizance of this feature in the tradition of
the theory of self-consciousness seems to be Gilles Deleuze. In Logique du sens
he writes, referring to Sartre:
20
I am trying to determine an impersonal and preindividual transcendental
field that does not resemble the corresponding empirical fields and yet
is not identical with an undifferentiated depth. This field cannot be de-
termined as that of a consciousness: in spite of Sartre's attempt to do
so, one cannot retain consciousness as a milieu and at the same time
take exception to the form of the person and the point of view of in-
dividuation. A consciousness is nothing without a unifying synthesis,
but there is no unifying synthesis of consciousness without a form of
the I and a point of view of the Ego. (LS, 124)
I will return to Deleuze later, who in this context was important only as evidence
for a neostructuralist approach that wishes to uphold a modified transcendental-
philosophical standpoint. He, to be sure, thinks that one has to renounce the
category of consciousness (because consciousness supposedly always has to be
thought of as personal as well as unified structure).
(b) We yet have to cover the second aspect of our third question addressed
at Heidegger's archaeology of self-consciousness. It asserts that self-
consciousness was not only (frequently) conceived as I-less; already for the early
romantics and, for example, for Schelling there was no necessity of attributing
to it the present tenseas self-presence. In Das Problem "Zeit" in der deutschen
Romantik I demonstrated that with the liberation from the model of reflection the
bond to the present was simultaneously overcome. Husserl had the problem of
imagining a consciousness beyond the present. He believed that our conscious-
196 LECTURE 12
ness was indeed a flow, but one that "retains" {retiniereri) immediately past phases
of consciousness and "protains" (protinieren) immediately following experiences
of consciousness, and it does this always from the position of presence. Thus
Sartre's polemical metaphor of the common houseflies that press their noses hard
against the windowpane of presence, but that never step into the past or into the
future, was justified.
21
The cogito that is banned to the circle of self-reflection
remains instantaneous and cannot get away from itself: it is its own re-pre-
sentation and is condemned to exist always in the present of its own gaze. This
is not true for prereflective self-consciousness: it is always consciousness of
something, and this, moreover, is something other than itself. Compared to the
being of which it is consciousness, it is not being itself; it is not an object at all,
not even its own object. It is, on the contrary, the absolute nonobject, something
that is relatively nonbeing compared to the world of objects. By virtue of its own
relative non-Being it is always already outside itself: in the future with its projec-
tions, in the past with its factual Being. It is thus thrown into time, even before
it is with itself-as reflection; the meaning of Being, therefore, unveils itself as
being-past, and on the ground of this being-past self-consciousness projects its
future as that which it now is not, but which it at some time will be (and at that
time, to be sure, in the manner of being-past). Thus it is emphatically not true
of prereflective self-consciousness that it is a present identical with itself; it has,
rather, the structure of "absent-presence" (BN, 103).
As far as this part of our correction of Heidegger's equation of self-con-
sciousness with self-presence is concerned, we will see that Derrida is in part not
affected by it. His little known first publication, the long introduction to Edmund
Husserl's Vorigine de la gomtrie,
12
emphasized on the basis of Husserl's analy-
sis of temporality that in his last notes even Husserl found a way out of the entan-
glement of the self in the sphere of the "living present" {du prsent vivant).
4. The final objection I want to formulate with regard to the theoretical basis
concerning the subject shared by Heidegger and neostructuralism is directed at
the assumption that the fact of self-consciousness, which nobody denies, not even
Heidegger and Derrida, can be derived from something itself not conscious, such
as a structure,
To be sure, this objection does not retract what we conceded in point (1),
namely, that self-consciousness experiences itself as something dependent, as
nonground of its subsistence. Our present objection has nothing to do with the
absolute dependence of the subject on its ground; it deals rather with the thesis
that self-consciousness can be derived from a structure that itself does not imply
consciousness. I want to speak very briefly to this point since neostructuralist at-
tempts to derive self-consciousness from a play of signifiers are much more
differentiated, though also bolder, than Heidegger's attempt to deduce subjec-
tivity from the care structure of Dasein.
Heidegger understands care as the mode of Being of Having-to-be. Dasein has
LECTURE 12 197
"to be" its Being in the same sense as Christ had to take up his cross. Dasein is
thus a negative reference to itself: it is concerned with itself, it constantly refers
back to its facticity from the future of its projections; in short, it subsists as self-
reference.
To subsist as self-reference: Self-caring Dasein obviously shares this charac-
teristic with self-consciousness. Since Heidegger no longer wants to recognize
self-consciousness as a point of departure of ontology, he arrives at the idea of
deriving it as secondary effect from a much more fundamental structure, namely,
of care, or of self-understanding. The objection we made earlier to the model of
reflection of the subject is also valid in this instance: one can never gain con-
sciousness from something that is not already conscious. Sartre emphasized this
clearly in a famous objection to Heidegger.
Heidegger, wishing to avoid that descriptive phenomenalism which
leads to the Megarian, antidialectic isolation of essences, begins with
the existential analytic without going through the cogito. But since the
Dasein has from the start been deprived of the dimension of conscious-
ness, it can never regain this dimension. Heidegger endows human real-
ity with a self-understanding which he defines as an "ekstatic pro-ject"
of its own possibilities. It is certainly not my intention to deny the exis-
tence of this project. But how could there be an understanding which
would not in itself be the consciousness (of) being understanding? This
ekstatic character of human reality will lapse into a thing-like, blind in-
itself unless it arises from the consciousness of ekstasis. In truth the
cogito must be our point of departure, but we can say of it, parodying a
famous saying, that it leads us only on condition that we get out of it.
(BN, 73-74)
In other words, consciousness is always and only what it is (for itself): "en acte?
as Sartre liked to say; there is no possible or latent consciousness, but only con-
sciousness of virtualities and latencies.
23
If Heidegger wants to have a prereflec-
tive "having a mood," "experiencing," or "self-understanding" precede conscious-
ness (cf. BT, 175-76), then this makes sense only on the basis of the
terminological agreement to take consciousness as synonymous with cognition,
and self-consciousness as synonymous with self-cognition, i.e., with reflection.
In this sense one can indeed say, as Heidegger does, "that only because the 'there'
has already been disclosed in a state-of-mind can immanent reflection come
across 'Experiences' at all" (BT
y
175). This "unreflecting devotion to the 'world'
with which it is concerned and on which it expends itself (BT, 175-76) could,
of course, only then include "understanding" if it also were conscious (which does
not mean: if it also reflects), for an understanding without consciousness of un-
derstanding would simply be no understanding (although one can easily think of
comprehension without reflection that is given over to the world). If Heidegger
seriously denies the possibility of understanding consciousness, then this is based
198 U LbCi UK I Z
on a confusion of consciousness and self-cognition. If one erases the traces of this
confusion, then there is nothing miraculous about the thesis that explicit and ob-
jectifying consciousness (as the scientist applies it and as it was thematized by
Descartes in his cogito) is something that over against prereflective conscious-
ness, as it is manifested in understanding, caring, and having a mood, is "derived"
(abkunftig).
This thesis says nothing more than that the scientific "looking-at . . ." (and
thus explicit and objectified observation and knowledge) always presupposes con-
sciousness and, more precisely, self-consciousness. Heidegger, indeed, states
this frequently.
This understanding [he means the "prereflective" self-understanding],
like any understanding, is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge
about them, but a primordially existential kind of Being, which, more
than anything else, makes such knowledge and acquaintance
possible. . . .
By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in understanding
(the circumspection of concern is understanding as common sense [Ver-
stndigkeit]), we have deprived pure intuition [Anschauen] of its pri-
ority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand
in traditional ontology. "Intuition" and "thinking" are both derivatives of
understanding, and already rather remote ones. Even the phenomeno-
logical "intuition of essences" [Wesensschau] is grounded in existential
understanding. . . .
[The scientific ideal of knowledge] is itself only a subspecies of un-
derstanding. (BT, 161, 187, 194)
This claim by Heidegger to have derived the idealist or phenomenological
"consciousness" from something itself not consciousan existential structure-
collapses as soon as one introduces the terminological differentiation of nonposit-
ing and positing consciousness. Neither the neostructuralists nor Heidegger know
this differentiation. They constantly speak of self-consciousness, where they
should speak of self-reflection; it is fairly easy, however, to demonstrate (as
Fichte has already done) that self-reflection is grounded in something that itself
is not reflected. But this nondifferentiation is not simply a terminological lapse:
neostructuralism does not seem to be aware of the theory of the prereflective
cogito, so that the phenomenon of subjectivity shrinks to the entirely different
phenomenon of self-cognition. The neostructuralist attempt to derive self-reflec-
tion from the differential play of signifiers is, of course, more daring than Heideg-
ger's (easily correctable) thesis that knowledge is a derived form of under-
standing.
Over the course of the next lectures we will see in what way the neostruc-
turalists develop and found their view of the subject. Prior to this, however, we
want to track down another tradition.
Lecture 13
In the previous lecture I looked at Heidegger's view of essence and the "history
of Being" of subjectivity. We found that Heidegger describes the history of Euro-
pean thought as the history of a successive repression of Being in the direction
of essence, i.e., in the direction of the objectified characteristics of being that
manifest themselves in re-presentation and that are sublated in thought. At the
culmination of this movement, according to Heidegger, appears the owner of
those representations, namely, the subject. Following Nietzsche, he characterizes
it as generated by a will to domination of the world, whose Being shrinks to mere
presence at hand: to an object for scientific and technical manipulation.
This view of the essence of the subject fundamentally influenced the theory of
neostructuralism, above all Derrida. Because Heidegger's influence is also evi-
dent at the weaker points, which Derrida's theory of the subject does not evade,
I formulated at the outset four objections against Heidegger in order to be able
to refer to them in what follows. I want to repeat Heidegger's theses and my criti-
cism in abbreviated fashion.
1. Heidegger conceives subjectivity as being in the service of the will to self-
empowerment and world domination. In contrast to this, modernity, however,
and particularly German idealism, thought of subjectivity as absolute Being-
dependent on an (as Schelling says) "unprereflective Being."
1
2. Heidegger believes-according to his thesis that the West interprets Being
as presence that the subject is alongside itself as presence, or as something that
represents itself, i.e., as reflection. This model, however, was overcome at the
1QQ
200 LECTURE 13
very latest by Fichte and the early romantics, who no longer think of self-
consciousness as relation of reflections.
3. The thus conceived familiarity of consciousness with itself is to be thought
of neither as I-ness nor as instantaneousness except from time or bound to the
present. In contrast to what Heidegger maintains, neither the romantic philoso-
phers nor Sartre did this; rather without exception they described self-
consciousness as Hess and temporal.
4. Heidegger wants to understand self-consciousness as a "derived mode" of
the structure either of understanding or of care. This attempt fails because the re-
lations that Dasein, in understanding and caring, has with itself must already have
the character of consciousness if one is supposed to be able to distinguish them
from relations in inorganic nature, and then put them up against a reductionistic
materialism.
Heidegger's theory of the subject is apparent in all of neostructuralism, and
this is unfortunately also true for the errors inscribed in his model. Heidegger
was, of course, not the only, maybe not even the decisive authority for neostruc-
turalism's theory of the subject. Nietzsche's and Freud's discovery of the uncon-
scious as an autonomous aspect of spiritual life also had its effect. Nietzsche never
systematically presented his theory of the subject, and it is difficult to try to report
in a coherent way on what he uttered on the theme of the subject and of conscious-
ness in various phases of his life. Neostructuralism's reading of Nietzsche, how-
ever, itself has an eclectic character, and this provides us with the justification
for highlighting some basic ideas that found resonance in neostructuralism.
Nietzsche, first of all, declares the "subject" to be a mere "fiction": "the ego
of which every one speaks when he blames egoism, does not exist at all" {Works,
XIV, 294). The subject is much rather an epiphenomenon of the will to power
or of life. This formulation, however, is misleading. On the one hand, it permits
conclusions like the following: The human being "as a rule can perceive nothing
of himself but his outworks. The actual fortress is inaccessible, and even invisi-
ble, to him" {Works, VI, 357). In this sense the subject is an organ of misunder-
standing that, far from conducting the will to power, is rather itself in the service
of it {Works, XV, 40), and it developed evolutionarily-biologically for the pur-
pose of the sustaining of the herd nature of the human being {Works, X, 298-99).
2
Communicability presupposes identical schematization of experiences within a
communicative community; in order to assure such an identity of schemes, real-
ity, which is constantly in flux, has to be subjected to rules: it is a matter of "a
particular species of animal which can prosper only by means of a certain exact-
ness, or, better still, regularity in recording its perceptions" {Works, XV, II).
This subjecting to rules is, of course, entirely external to reality; it is a mere
fiction without which a certain species of animal called human being would not
be able to cope with life. The will to knowledge, or the will to truth, both centered
in the subject, are therefore secondary operations of the will to power for the sake
LECTURE 13 201
of preserving a bearable social condition. To this extent the subject is a "projec-
tion" of identities and regularities into nature that in itself is chaotic (cf. Works,
XV, 116). And "all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic com-
mentary of an unknown text, one which is perhaps unknowable but yet felt"
(Works, IX, 127), that of the unconscious will. This is also true for the tasks of
morality that, just like words and the rules for their combination, are bound to
iterability as their law of Being: actions, the neglect of which is penalized by sanc-
tions, and which therefore can be expected from others and presupposed with
some reliability, support sociability; they stabilize the "herds" in which the human
being prospers as "factory product of nature" (Schopenhauer). In the human being
"nature" has succeeded in "the breeding of an animal that can promise," i.e., that
assumes the responsibility for the predictability of its actions (Works, XIII, 61).
For this the introduction of conscience was necessary. Nietzsche compares it to
a "system of mnemonics" that burns "memory" into the human being (Works, XIII,
66). This process, as a result of which the human being in the natural incalculabil-
ity and arbitrariness of its amoral striving for power becomes "to a certain extent,
necessitated, uniform, like among his like, regular, and consequently calculable"
(Works, XIII, 63), Nietzsche likes to describe as a process of inscription in the
sense of branding.
3
This is an idea that, above all, is picked up again and again
by Foucault and Deleuze when they talk about the subject as the effect of mutila-
tion, entirely in the spirit of Nietzsche, who in The Genealogy of Morals says:
When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never
accomplishes it without blood, tortures, and sacrifice; the most dreadful
sacrifices and forfeitures (among them the sacrifice of the firstborn), the
most loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel
rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom
systems of cruelty)-all these things originate from that instinct which
found in pain its most potent mnemonic. In a certain sense the whole of
asceticism is to be ascribed to this: certain ideas have got to be made
inextinguishable, omnipresent, "fixed," with the object of hypnotising
the whole nervous and intellectual system through these "fixed
ideas." . . . The worse memory man had, the ghastlier the signs
presented by his customs; the severity of the penal laws affords in par-
ticular a gauge of the extent of man's difficulty in conquering forgetful-
ness, and in keeping a few primal postulates of social intercourse ever
present to the minds of those who were the slaves of every momentary
emotion and every momentary desire. (Works, XIII, 66-67)
The most internalized form of social memory is rationality or the will to truth.
The will to truth is a process of establishing things', it is a process of
making things true and lasting, a total elimination of that false charac-
ter, a transvaluation of it into being. . . . Life is based on the
202 D LECTURE 13
hypothesis of a belief in stable and regularly recurring things; the
mightier it is, the more vast must be the world of knowledge and the
world called being. Logicising, rationalising, and systematising are of
assistance as means of existence. (Works, XV, 60-61)
The ascetic ideal of truth and rationality, however, is not in the service of the
strong and cruel life of the individual, of the powerful human being who serves
as a bridge to the Superman; rather it is in the service of the herd, which pays
attention to the transferability of experiences, to the equivalence of claims, and
the comparability of legal means: in short, to the rationality of the forms of inter-
course whose most internalized form is reason. Viewed from this perspective,
reason is "Life turned against Life" (Works, XIII, 153). For this reason the will
to truth-as the internalization of the claims of the will to survival of the "ail-too
many"-is itself in need of a critique for the sake of the breeding of the Superman.
"The Will for Truth needed a critique . . . the value of truth is tentatively to be
called into question''' (Works, XIII, 198). Instead of a critique of reason that un-
covers a subject subservient to morality and truth as the condition of all yea-
saying (be that as affirmation or as a positing of values), there rather is need of
a "self-critique of reason" (Works, XIII, 201). It unmasks the morally autonomous
and truthful subject as an instrument of the will to life, insofar as this will to life
is already weakened ("degenerated") and sickened by the respect for "the
general."
So far we have illuminated, as I said earlier, only one side of Nietzsche's the-
ory of the subject. The subject, according to this view, is simply an organ of mis-
apprehension in that it considers itself to be the ruler of the dark life, whereas
it is actually ruled by it. Nietzsche's attack on the "superstitions of logicians" is
well known: according to this view "the subject T is the condition of the predicate
'think' "; whereas in reality, "One thinks; but that this 'one' is precisely the famous
old 'ego,' is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not
an immediate certainty' " (Works, XII, 24). This already points ahead to Lacan's
formula: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (E, 166).
If one pays close attention, both in Nietzsche's and in Lacan's formulation sub-
jectivity is not simply denied, rather it is differentiated or duplicated. Obviously,
one can distinguish the subject of modern philosophy-as the place of misappre-
hension-from a true subject, from that which is real and not mere "fraud" and
invented, and about which Lacan speaks as the "true subject." Between the two
a correspondence takes place: the fiction Nietzsche describes the I (or the subject,
consciousness, or thought) to be is always the product of a useful mistake, that
is, of a life-preserving misapprehension of Being and the will to power. In this
respect Nietzsche remains a Kantian: he considers the outer and the inner world
to be an undifferentiated chaos that is in need of synthetic acts in order to be artic-
ulated for us. He calls these syntheses, from which he derives morality and
LECTURE 13 203
reasonableness, fictions. They do not describe actual being, but rather forms by
which life adapts to external conditions. Truth, as we saw, is a fiction that makes
it easier for the masses to live together by binding its manifestations to the rule
of verification and reiteration, and thus to commensurability for everyone.
Thus, "truth" is not something which is present and which has to be
found and discovered; it is something which has to be created and
which gives its name to a process, or, better still, to the Will to over-
power, which in itself has no purpose: to introduce truth is a processus
in infinitum, an active determining it is not a process of becoming con-
scious of something, which in itself is fixed and determined. . . . Man
projects his instinct of truth, his "aim" to a certain extent beyond him-
self, in the form of a metaphysical world of Being, a "thing-in-itself," a
world already to hand. His requirements as a creator make him invent
the world in which he works in advance; he anticipates it: this anticipa-
tion (this faith in truth) is his mainstay. . . .
The assumed world of subject, substance, "reason," etc., is neces-
sary: an adjusting, simplifying, falsifying, artificially-separating power
resides in us. "Truth" is the will to be master over the manifold sensa-
tions that reach consciousness; it is the will to classify phenomena ac-
cording to definite categories. {Works, XV, 60-61, 33)
Even if with this Kant's subject-the representation of a representation that lends
unity and profile to the manifoldness of empirical reality is declared to be some-
thing that is derived, the will to power simply inherits the task that in Kant was
assigned to the subject, namely, to bring order into sensual chaos.
4
To the degree
that the subject of modern philosophy is rejected as a mere "thing of fantasy"
{Works, XV, 59), the subject of the will to power inherits the function that the
transcendental subject vacated.
Nietzsche actually draws this conclusion. If the world of phenomena
"adjusted" and "made logical" for the sake of communicability and recogniz-
ability is not the true world, but rather a pure fiction, then one can still ask
"whether this creating, rationalising, adjusting, and falsifying be not the best-
guaranteed reality itself: in short, whether that which 'fixes the meaning of things'
is not the only reality: and whether the 'effect of environment upon us' be not
merely the result of such will-exercising subjects . . . The subject alone is
demonstrable; the hypothesis might be advanced that subjects are all that ex-
ist,that the object [is] only . . . a modus of the subjecf {Works, XV, 73-74).
Nietzsche thus acknowledges a certain subjectivism for which Heidegger will
reproach himeven though it is not an idealistic, but rather a voluntaristic subjec-
tivism of the sort that the will to power that produces representations and values
is the true subject. This true subject does not, of courselike Kant'srepresent
itself in its truth; it has no truth whatsoever. All of its representations as I, as
substance, causality, or autonomy is deception: a perspectival "interpretation"
204 D LECTURE 13
(cf. Works, XIV, 213, and XV, 16) of the in itself "unknowable" and "amorphous
and unadjustable world consisting of the chaos of sensations" (Works, XV, 73).
The genesis of the word "I" consists in the gradually accepted "absurd habit" of
assuming a "sort of perspective in seeing which makes sight a cause of seeing in
itself: this was the feat in the invention of the 'subject' and the 'ego' " (Works, XV,
54). In the institution of this double sight not the I (as intellect-subject) but the
will to power is operating, the power-subject. This will to power represents itself
before its own eyes as truth; i.e., it imagines the spectacle of a world that is
brought in order, subjected to the principium contradictions, morally reliable,
and, with regard to its significations, repeatable.
5
This world of truth-which "in
truth" is fictitious and in which the concept of a self-identical and active subject
plays its role is not, however, the aim of the will to power, but only something
like a means of its desire for intensification: "not a 'substance/ but rather some-
thing which in itself strives after greater strength; and which wishes to 'preserve'
itself only indirectly (it wishes to surpass itself)" (Works, XV, 17). The phenome-
non of subjectivity thus seems to be derived from a unified principle in two steps:
in the first step the will-subject invents the subject of the fictitious world in order
to provide itself with a basis for self-preservation. What we call "truth" is, there-
fore, only a projection of "our conditions of existence as the attributes of being
in general. Owing to the fact that, in order to prosper, we must be stable in our
belief, we developed the idea that the real world was neither a changing nor an
evolving one, but a world of being" (Works, XV, 26). However, once this basis
for self-preservation is provided (on which the "herd" would like to retire once
and for all), it is instantly transgressed by the true subject of the will. For the will
to power is concerned not only with preservation but also with growth and
intensification-this being the second step. Any mere preservation would be de-
cline. The assurance of living space (Lebensraum) is always only a means, never
the aim of the will. The purpose is surpassing, overpowering of the self, the will-
to-become-stronger and as such "of more value than truth" (Works, XV, 292).
From this follows the conclusion that the true subject-like the true world-is
indeterminable in its essence: "The sphere of a subject increasing or diminishing
unremittingly, the centre of the system continually displacing itself (Works, XV,
17). Each fixation of this fluctuation of the subject, enforced upon it by the law
of intensification of the self, is the work of an "interpretation" (understood as the
most general "means in itself to become master of something" [Works, XV, 125],
as "a form of the Will to Power" [Works, XV, 65]). The world is frozen into a
"logical form" by means of interpretation, but its iterability, formulizability, cal-
culability, and necessity are "not an established fact, but an interpretation"
(Works, XV, 59): "from the fact that something happens regularly, and that its
occurrence may be reckoned upon, it does not follow that it happens necessarily"
(Works, XV, 58). The subject of the will to power is the actual movens of the
evolving world, which is always only transitorily forced to obey the law of decep-
LECTURE 13 205
tion (i.e., the law of identical iterability and of logicalness), whose character,
however, is "in truth" "non-formulizable," "false," and "self-contradictory."
"Knowledge and the process of evolution exclude each other. Consequently,
knowledge must be something else: it must be preceded by a will to make things
knowable, a kind of Becoming in itself must create the illusion of Being" (Works,
XV, 33-34).
Innumerable other passages could be cited that would support this ambiguous
theory of consciousness and subjectivity. It is not Nietzsche, however, who is the
subject of our investigation, but rather neostructuralisnfs theory of the subject,
to which Nietzsche transmitted important impulses. Let's summarize the most im-
portant observations. Like Heidegger (even if with different means), Nietzsche
thinks of the subject as something "derivative"; like Heidegger, he conceives it
as an explicit self-relation of the sort of representation that an I directs toward
itself (whereby the I is, of course, itself the result of an "error": the projection
of an "agent," which "lay at the root of all things"; Works, XVI, 37). From behind
this derived subjectthe unifying agent of the fictitious worldthe true subject,
which is necessarily misapprehended by the conscious subject (and this accounts
for the "unconquerable distrust of the possibility of self-knowledge"; Works, XII,
252), steps forward. It can also not be known because it is in constant flux and
because the determinations, into which the fictitious subject forces it, only
serve as stepping-stones to new interpretations behind which the will to self-
intensification operates. For semantics this leads to the consequence that the proc-
ess of interpretation (of the permanent self-explanations in which the will to
power aesthetically mirrors itself) is infinite: "all existence is . . . essentially
an explaining existence" (Works, X, 340). "The world . . . has once more be-
come infinite' to us: in so far as we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains
infinite interpretations" (Works, X, 340-41). Lacan will reformulate this insight
in language-theoretical terms as follows:
From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the
meaning "insists" but that none of its elements "consists" in the signi-
fication of which it is at the moment capable.
We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of
the signified under the signifier. (, 153-54)
Like Nietzsche, Lacan thinks of this unconquerability of the effects of meaning
as the linguistic manifestation of a "true subject" that can never be reduced to Be-
ing and that is always becoming. That portion of the deeds of the true subject that
arrives at consciousness is never the subject in its entirety (both of these, con-
sciousness and the true subject, do not have the same center, they are eccentri-
cally opposed to each other in such a way that the unconscious subject surrounds
the subject of consciousness [E, 165-66 and 163]).
Lacan, too like Nietzsche thinks of the conscious subject as a fictitious (or
206 D LECTURE 13
as he prefers to say, "imaginary") self-reflection. He imagines this quite pictori-
ally: consciousness (and thus meaning) evolves when the productivity of the un-
conscious subject is reflected back on itself by means of a kind of arresting of its
gliding. Lacan calls the point at which this reflection occurs the "anchoring point"
(, 154).
The diachronic function of this anchoring point is to be found in the
sentence, even if the sentence completes its signification only with its
last term, each term being anticipated in the construction of the others,
and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect. . . .
This is a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each
stage what he was before and announces himselfhe will have been
only in the future perfect tense.
At this point the ambiguity of a failure to recognize that is essential
to knowing myself (un mconnatre essentiel au me connatre) is in-
troduced. For, in this "rear view" (rtrovise), all that the subject can
be certain of is the anticipated image coming to meet him that he
catches of himself in his mirror. (303, 306)
The pun "mconnatre"!"me connatre''already indicates what Lacan thinks is im-
portant: the function of self-consciousness, he believes, is a function of missap-
prehension that helike Nietzschedesignates as "imaginary."
The only homogeneous function of consciousness is in the imaginary
capture of the ego through its specular reflection and in the function of
the failure to recognize which remains attached to it. (E[Fr. d.], 832)
I will come back to this later. For the moment, I only wanted to supply evidence
for the fact that Nietzsche's differentiation of a true and a fictitious subject recurs
in Lacan and has a recognizably similar function.
But Nietzsche's theory of the subject brings into play something else besides
the idea of necessary misapprehension: first, the idea that the subject cannot be
subjected to a concept, not even a scientific concept, because of its ungraspability
(as semantic variable it shares the indeterminateness of all semantic phenomena
and permits "infinite interpretations"); second, it brings into play the language-
philosophical foundation of the theory of subject that is so characteristic for neo-
structuralism. According to this theory, self-consciousness is not simply depen-
dent on the "true subject," on the unconscious; it rather proves to be an effect of
language, or, as Lacan says, of the signifier.
My own presence to myself has been preceded by a language. Older
than consciousness, older than the spectator, prior to any attendance, a
sentence awaits "you": looks at you, observes you, watches over you,
and regards you from every side. . . .
The text occupies the place before "me"; . . . announces me to my-
LECTURE 13 D 207
self, keeps watch over the complicity I entertain with my most secret
present.
We have to take a closer look at the presuppositions of this linguistic reinterpreta-
tion of the dependence of self-consciousness.
At an earlier point in our series of lectures we came across the name of
Nietzsche in the context of a language-philosophical reinterpretation of the tran-
scendental subject. In his essay "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,"
he popularized certain ideas of Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt. They can be
summarized as follows: first, the idea that the thought of a synthesizing and con-
stituting subject must somehow be "determined" for the sake of its distinguishabil-
ity from other thoughts (and all determination presupposes distinction, i.e., for-
mation of signs); and second, the idea that the transcendental subject is no longer
the author of meaning-effects, but rather itself is an effect of the linguistic
schematism. Reason, as Herder put it, is only constituted in fictions; it is the ab-
stract form that is stripped of the concrete schematization of the world in signs,
the reflection of the syntheses by means of which representations are connected
with sound-images in the regulated unity of a life praxis, and differentiated as
signs from other signs. The concepts thus do not determine the words but are in-
vested, as it were, in the words. They are the relations between perceptions that
have become rigid and binding for a thought community, and as such they are
"illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors
which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse
effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal" {Works,
II, 180). Just as the coins are the abstract expression of functional value, words
are the abstract expression of the syntheses of imagination or of our capacity to
perceive: transpositions of nerve stimuli that have to be schematized and made
"canonical" for the sake of their intersubjective validity.
In reference to this turn against classical philosophy of consciousness (accord-
ing to which the word represents a prior thought), Heidegger spoke of a simple
"overturning."
7
Nietzsche inverts the directional meaning of the relation between
perception and concept by making the concept dependent on full perception. For-
merly the metaphor used to be one of a deviation controlled by the law of similar-
ity ("analogy"), which perception could allow itself in order to sensualize a
thought that in itself was nonsensual. In Nietzsche, however, it is the original
mode of Being of everything linguistic, and the concept appears as the product
of a subsequent abstraction (as "the residuum of a metaphor," [Works, II, 181]).
8
Nietzsche thus does not escape the thought of re-presentation, only he no longer
takes the word as representation of thought, but rather takes thought as represen-
tation of the word. In this "overturning" is grounded his claim to "grammar."
What he contributes to this is, from a language-philosophical standpoint, diffuse
208 LECTURE 13
and immature, but it has, however, had its effect. He can now derive all achieve-
ments of a culture, that formerly had to be attributed to a transcendental con-
sciousness, from grammatical functions by means of that which he calls "the com-
mon philosophy of grammar" (Works, XII, 29). All thinking is caught up in "the
spell of certain grammatical functions" (Works, XII, 29). (At this point I am
neglecting the disturbing fact that Nietzsche attributes this spell, for its part-"in
the last analysis"to the "spell ofphysiological valuations and racial conditions,"
and therewith not only allows for the Gobineau syndrome, but also rehabilitates
a rather clumsy representationism: thus the "grammar" of the late nineteenth cen-
tury and of prenazism is prefigured in Nietzsche's thought.)
Be that as it may, the fact that thought is placed in the service of grammar
(in which, according to Nietzsche, is always engraved a sort of "popular
metaphysics" [Works, X, 300]) ipso facto subjects thought (the subject, con-
sciousness) to the demands of grammar. Here Nietzsche includes, above all,
schematization and regularity: identity of the rules of usage and iterability of the
signs without loss of signification. Those are demands without which language
would not be able to function intersubjectively, i.e., without which a conscious-
ness could never become linguistic. Language is by nature intersubjective, it does
not exist privately. Nietzsche is already thinking of the "philosophy of grammar"
when he says of "consciousness" that it "generally has only been developed under
the pressure of the necessity for communication" (Works, X, 297). This necessity
Nietzsche interprets in analogy to the paradigm of Darwinismgenealogically:
it articulates the will to life and the will to power from the side of a certain weak-
ness (insofar as the human being needs the "herd"thus the social bond in order
to survive; "the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it"
[Works, X, 297]).
It is essential that one should not mistake the part that "consciousness"
plays: it is our relation to the outer world', it was the outer world that
developed it. (Works, XV, 39)
This means that our consciousness is not "the general sensorium and highest rul-
ing centre," thus "not the conducting force, but an organ of the latter" (Works,
XV, 40). It is formed under the pressure of "a sort of directing committee, in
which the various leading desires make their votes and their power felt" (Works,
XV, 39). The function it has to fulfill in the service of surviving within the herd
is already familiar to us; "it is only a means of communication: it was developed
by intercourse, and with a view to the interests of intercourse" (Works, XV, 40).
In The Joyful Wisdom Nietzsche is most elaborate about this point.
The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come
within the range of our consciousness at least a part of them is the
LECTURE 13 D 209
result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man's destiny: as the most
endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fel-
lows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to
make himself understoodand for all this he needed "consciousness"
first of all: he had to "know" himself what he lacked, to "know" how he
felt, and to "know" what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man,
like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the
thinking which is becoming conscious of itself h only the smallest part
thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part:-for this
conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols
for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is
revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of
consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go
hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that
serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pres-
sure and the gestures; our becoming conscious of our sense impres-
sions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate
them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity
has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The
sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more
acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned
to become conscious of himself,he is doing so still, and doing so
more and more. As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not
properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the so-
cial and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only
in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely devel-
oped; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of
understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing him-
self," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him,
namely, his "averageness";-that our thought itself is continuously as it
were outvoted by the character of consciousness by the imperious
"genius of the species" therein-and is translated back into the perspec-
tive of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable
manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual-there is
no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness,
they do not appear so any longer. (Works, X, 297-99)
Although Nietzsche by no means takes the side of language or consciousness-on
the contrary, he despises them as "characteristic of the herd"; their achievements
are "a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisa-
tion" (Works, X, 299)-he nevertheless points to something that in his later
philosophizing will be treated as the impossibility of a private language. For
Nietzsche this attack on the inwardness of the individual has the form of "an in-
visible speir (Works, XII, 28) to which the individual succumbs as a result of the
210 Q LECTURE 13
pressure to adapt to the equalizing "herd" that substitutes the universal sign for
individual impression. If one were to talk of the individual and Nietzsche ex-
pressly does not do so as the true subject, then one could characterize the step
into the linguistic as a "subversion of the subject by the ordre symbolique" We
will see in a moment that Nietzsche himself is thinking within "the spell of gram-
mar" at this point. His distinction between the individual and the universal
where the individual is the object of perception, the universal the object of a
conceptfollows the language game of Kant's critique of knowledge by inverting
its preference for the communicable and the universal.
But let's remain for a moment with what he calls the philosophy of grammar.
Here Nietzsche is obviously not thinking of something like a philosophy that has
the grammar of a language as its object, but rather of a worldview inserted into
an existing language, or, as he sarcastically expresses it, a "popular metaphysics"
{Works, X, 300). The philosophy of philosophers is only its translation or its thin-
ning out into something abstract. Behind this assertion there lurks the hermeneuti-
cal thesis that the philosophy of an age remains dependent on the terms and cate-
gories that are supplied by the linguistically articulated worldview, and that it is
greatly deceived if it believes that it can free itself from the "toils of grammar"
by means of thought {Works, X, 300). The distinction between subject and object
is Nietzsche's favorite example for a compulsion of thought engraved into Euro-
pean grammar, at the bottom of which lies absolutely no higher necessity.
9
One
believed in " 'the soul' as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject:
one said, T is the condition, 'think' is the predicate and is conditioned" {Works,
XII, 72). Such philosophical propositions prove to be nothing more, however,
than a "deception on the part of grammar" {Works, XII, 2). "The wonderful family
resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophising," for example, is
explained by them {Works, XII, 29). Philosophical thought is thus "far less a dis-
covery than a re-recognising, a remembering, a return and a home-coming" to
the "common-household" of the underlying linguistic construction of the world
{Works, XII, 29).
In fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common phi-
losophy of grammarI mean owing to the unconscious domination and
guidance of similar grammatical functions it cannot but be that every-
thing is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession
of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain
other possibilities of world-interpretation. {Works, XII, 29)
With this conclusion, which comes close to a veritable linguistic determinism
think of the famous statement in The Twilight of the Idols: " 'Reason' in lan-
guage!oh what a deceptive old witch it has been! I fear we shall never be rid
of God, so long as we still believe in grammar" (Works, XVI, 22) he denies in
a certain way the openness and infiniteness of interpretation and the grammatical
LECTURE 13 Q 211
nonfixability of the subject that only becomes real in becoming; namely, the will-
subject. This is one of many contradictions in Nietzsche's thought that accounts
for the fact that linguistic determinists as well as hermeneuticists and neostruc-
turalists could appeal to him.
But let's return to the argument that language essentially excludes the expres-
sion of the individual or the private (Nietzsche does not distinguish between the
two). This argument (or maybe we should speak of a thesis) stands in harsh con-
trast to the romantic and to the Humboldtian view of language, which was dialec-
tic and which conceived the process of linguistic tradition as a reciprocal action
of the universal ("the law of language") and the individual ("language usage"). Ac-
cording to this, the universal has a motivating, but no determining power over
individual speech: the sign syntheses are hypotheses that themselves are grounded
in interpretations and that are open to new interpretations, so that the system of
language is incalculably transformed over the course of its individual uses.
Not so in Nietzsche: Individual perception is destroyed as soon as the linguistic
community accepts it into its repertoire; as word-coin, the meaning of an in-
dividual experience shows the same face to everybody, and becomes "thereby
shallow, meagre, relatively stupid, a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic
of the herd" (Works, X, 299).
This theorem of the incompatibility of the private and the linguistic was taken
up, in a distinguishable, yet nevertheless related manner, by Anglo-Saxon analyt-
ical philosophy, as well as by neostructuralism. Best known is Wittgenstein's ver-
sion of a critique of the idea of a "private language." In his conception it has the
function of the decisive evasion in the face of the reproach of solipsism, whose
phantom haunted him for a long time. Under solipsism one understands an ex-
treme form of idealism, namely, the extension of the doubt in the existence of
a world independent of consciousness onto the existence of other thinking beings.
(If'they exist, then only mediated by my consciousness and as relative, not as ab-
solute beings.) For this radical doubt which accepts the givenness only of one's
own consciousnessWittgenstein (like some idealists before him) saw only one
remedy, namely, the reconsideration of our Being-in-language. This reconsidera-
tion was not only supposed to make the extreme of epistemological solipsism im-
potent, but was also supposed language-philosophically to overthrow idealist sub-
ject philosophy in its entirety from Berkeley though Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer,
Natorp, and Husserl to Sartre; and in this sense it was also decisive for the neo-
structuralist critique of subject-thought. One spoke of it as the linguistic turn; it
belongs to the few epistemological presuppositions that neostructuralism shares
with hermeneutics (since Schleiermacher) and with analytical philosophy, i.e.,
to be thought of along the lines of language. For this reason alone we have to take
a closer look at the language-philosophical subversion of the idealist subject of
knowledge before we turn to the work of Derrida and Lacan. Otherwise we will
understand poorly even after all we know about Heidegger's and Nietzsche's
212 LECTURE 13
roles as predecessors-why neostructuralist theory of the subject unfolded on the
basis of philosophy of language.
The oldest version of Wittgenstein's thesis, according to which the subject has
no privileged knowledge of its experiences of consciousness, can be found in
Schleiermacher: it is the germinal cell of the linguistic turn of all of modern phi-
losophy. In extreme simplification it states that the idea of a thought, a perception,
or a representation independent of language (and thus not articulated) arises from
a pure abstraction. Differences in the medium of the ideal can present themselves
only on the basis of a material and temporal (for example, phonic) difference.
Otherwise thought would remain an amorphous and foggy mass (HuK, 367) that
for the sake of its distinctness has to be led through what Lacan calls the dfil
du signifiant. But precisely this argument thrives on the attack on the model of
representation of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, according to which
speech designatively re-presents, as it were, almost as a nomenclature, the simple
ideas (or primordial impressions) of the soul and the connections that reason es-
tablished between them. Once it is demonstrated that distinctions in thought are
bound to differences between the carriers of expression-to "the determined dis-
tinguishing of significant units" (HuK, 365) and their recombination in words and
sentences
10
-then the supposed difference between thought and speech is reduced
to the difference between internal and spoken speech:
This leads us to the unity of speech and thought; language is the mode
of thought in which it is real. For there is no thought without speech.
The pronunciation of words merely refers to the presence of something
else and is therefore arbitrary. But nobody can think without words.
Without words thought is not yet completed and clear. {HUK, 11)
We have already seen that Saussure takes up this idea. In Wittgenstein it appears
in another variant that has so frequently been presented in detail or even attacked
that I will draw only a very brief sketch. Wittgenstein saw himself confronted
with a philosophical tradition that assumed that experiences were given to con-
sciousness in the form of "internal perceptions" in a manner that was evident only
to it. Wittgenstein, by contrast, seeks to show that the predicates by means of
which we designate our experiences of consciousness have a signification that re-
mains identical from the first-person and the third-person perspective. My pain
and my sensations are not more familiar to me than they are to you or him. The
limits of knowing something are coextensive with the limits of being able to speak
about something (Wittgenstein obviously shares this assumption with Nietzsche).
Wittgenstein justifies it in the following way: to have a certain sensation means
to distinguish it from other, comparable sensations, and thus to be able to identify
it over the course of time.
11
Only within the system of a language can one distin-
guish and identify something; a language system, in its nature, however, is inter-
subjective and transindividual. The epistemological problem of how I am able to
LECTURE 13 D 213
know my own or somebody else's inner states thus is transformed into a semantic
problem: how can I master a language and be certain that I have mastered it? If
I master the language, then the question about the subsistence of a private compo-
nent of signification is superfluous. For this concept contradicts the game-rules
of a meaningful use of linguistic expressions. Linguistic expressions do not iden-
tify their signified by themselves, and also not by pointing to it (ostension), but
rather only by virtue of a rule that supplies an intersubjective criterion for the cor-
rectness of the association of signifier and signified. To master a rule means to
be able to repeat identically the once established association (for instance, on the
example of an individual state of sensation that must lie in the past) in any number
of cases of application. As soon as I identify something by speaking, I am acting
in conformity with a rule; i.e., I am following a convention I learned, and the
mastery of which enables me to distinguish between correct and incorrect uses
of an expression in any number of speech situations. If, however, it were within
my power to designate private sensations with a name, then even / could not
definitively come to know my sensations; for I either proceed according to a rule
that distinguishes correct and incorrect applications of the word, which my neigh-
bor can also then learn; or I do not proceed according to a rule, and in this instance
even I do not recognize and designate my own states of consciousness. Wittgen-
stein concludes from this that the accessibility of the signification of my inner con-
ditions is just as unproblematic from the "I" perspective as it is from the "he" per-
spective.
12
You will say that only I can know whether I am in pain or whether I am in
love; somebody else could only presume it (PI, section 246). To this extent I have
epistemologically privileged access to my experiences of consciousness. Witt-
genstein takes exception to this with a somewhat sophistic argument. He says that
a word can have a significance only if it has a function, a function that only the
word can fulfill. That is not true for the use of the verb "to know," in the expres-
sion "I know that I am in pain." For this expression means exactly the same as:
"I am in pain" (PI, sections 533f.).
13
If one is in pain, then one is simply in pain.
The term "to know" is not appropriate as a designation for this, for in the case
of knowledge it must be logically possible to doubt what one previously knew.
That, however, is not and will never be the case for the expression of sensations;
therefore, the use of the predicate has no function in this case, it is meaningless.
This, of course, does not mean that when I am in love, the other person too has
to be in love; it does mean, however, that when I have knowledge of my being
in love, this knowledge has to be expressed on the level of signification, the regu-
lated use of which I share with the other language participants in the framework
of our common membership in a "form of life." / do not know this better than
anyone else.
Thus the reproach of solipsism is dissolved: one can mean something such
as an internal condition of consciousnessas something only within a language.
214 U L b t l UKt l i J
If, however, I already need the language I share with my neighbor to identify my
self and its states, then it is obviously too late to doubt their existence and to con-
sider the certainty I have concerning my experiences to be exclusive or private.
We will see in our next lecture how Derrida (and Lacan) take up the linguistic
turn of the philosophy of the subject and how they transform it.
Lecture 14
In our search for antecedents to neostructuralisnfs theory of the subject, we even-
tually came across analytical philosophy. At first glance its proximity to neostruc-
turalism seems rather doubtful. This is especially the case because analytical phi-
losophy takes seriously the dimension of the "meaning" (Sinn) and "signification"
(Bedeutung) of linguistic expressions, whereas neostructuralism "critically ques-
tions" meaning in order ultimately to arrive at something not meaningful in itself.
The method of analytical philosophy, as presented, for example, by Ernst
Tugendhat in his introductory lectures on analytical philosophy, consists in the
clarification of concepts by means of an exposition of the rules for the use of the
words to which they correspond.
l
As a fundamental discipline of philosophy, lan-
guage analysis is "formal semantics"; i.e., it is concerned with clarification of the
signification of concepts. It is a form of universal pragmatics whenever it makes
clarification of the signification of words contingent on contexts of practical ac-
tion, at least to the extent to which this action is sufficiently general that it can
be characterized formally.
To be sure, by proceeding in this way analytical philosophy attains (it would
be more correct to say that it presupposes) a rigid concept of rule and regularity.
Even its preference for the formal and the universal ("formal semantics," "univer-
sal pragmatics," etc.) expresses this. The demand that one work only with defined
concepts and clarify the signification of concepts by uncovering the rules for their
use testifies to a staunch belief in the dogma of unequivocality, of semantic iden-
tity, and of "capacity for presence" (Gegenwrtigen-Knneri). It is precisely this
that connects analytical philosophy with the deepest tradition of European
216 G LECTURE 14
metaphysics. Tugendhat expressly affirms this view when he says that "the tradi-
tional idea" of a philosophicarTundamental discipline as ontology . . . comes
into its own only in the idea of formal semantics."
2
This is a Hegelian formula-
tion: a tradition grasps its own truth only in that final philosophizing that provides
the "concept" for, or "brings into its concept," as Hegel says, the activity of
metaphysics that prior to that point had been relatively unconscious. Formal
semantics believes, in much the same way, that it has grasped the essence, discov-
ered the "concept" of Western ontology, and to this extent it belongs to this tradi-
tion itself.
On the other hand, analytical philosophy resembles the "knowledge interest"
of neostructuralism in that it criticizes metaphysical thought. We are all familiar
with the accusation that metaphysics operates with "pseudoconcepts" (Schein-
begriffe). These are concepts to which no signification (in the sense of a retro-
spective coupling to a legitimate word usage) can be assigned and which, there-
fore, are used "falsely." Examples of this are concepts like "the I," "the for- itself,"
or "the nothing," i.e., nominalizations of pronouns, adverbs, etc., whose gram-
maticality is thereby abused. The best known example for such a critique of
metaphysics is Rudolf Carnap's polemic against Heidegger's "the nothing nots"
{das Nichts nichtet). But the universal incrimination of senselessness, on the basis
of which language analysis denounces metaphysical thinking, simultaneously
"brings into its concept" the most profound passion of Western thought: the pas-
sion for unequivocality, enlightenment, and exactitude.
This does not prevent us from bringing out certain parallels between language
analysis and neostructuralism: first, the renunciation of metaphysics; second, re-
course to language and language use; and third, repudiation of the model of lin-
guistic representation.
Where the renunciation of metaphysics is concerned, we already saw that ana-
lytical and neostructuralist philosophy each understands it quite differently. The
incrimination of senselessness, with which language analysis for a long t i me-
and in a truly foolish fashion assailed idealist philosophy and all possible forms
of ethics and dialectics, finally indenturing itself to thoroughly conservative (rule-
affirming and rule-preserving) manners of thinking, remains in our memory to-
day only as a piece of cast-off history. Heidegger himself reacted by pointing out
the metaphysical heritage of this incrimination of senselessness: analytical philos-
ophy in its rigorously positivistic and scientistic extremes, according to Heideg-
ger, is the conceptual form of the technological and scientific age, and as such
it is the culmination of an interpretation of Being along the lines of the "presencing
the present" (knowledge for mastery).
The procedure that Derrida calls "deconstruction" is fundamentally distinct
from this form of an (alleged) critique of metaphysics. In the instance of this term
we are dealing with a neologism modeled on Heidegger's "The Task of Destroy-
ing the History of Ontology" (section 6 of BT, pp. 41ff.). What Heidegger means
LECTURE 14 217
by this is the endeavor of destroying that "metaphysics" that is operative in the
Western interpretation of "Being" "until we arrive at those primordial experiences
in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being" (BT, 44).
He explains this procedure as follows:
In thus demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an
investigation in which their "birth certificate" is displayed, we have
nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. But
this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking
off the ontological tradition. We must on the contrary, stake out the
positive possibilities of that tradition, and this always means keeping it
within its limits; these in turn are given factically in the way the ques-
tion is formulated at the time, and in the way the possible field for in-
vestigation is thus bounded off. On its negative side, this destruction
does not relate itself towards the past; its criticism is aimed at "today"
and at the prevalent way of treating the history of ontology, whether it
is headed towards doxography, towards intellectual history, or towards
a history of problems. But to bury the past in nullity [Nichtigkeit] is not
the purpose of this destruction; its aim is positive; its negative function
remains unexpressed and indirect. (BT, 44)
Derrida speaks of "deconstruction" in order to emphasize this positiveor, to be
more preciseconstructive aspect of the destruction of the Western interpretation
of Being. "Deconstruction" means the tearing down of the walls of Western
metaphysics, not with the purpose of destroying it, but rather in order to recon-
struct it (reconstruire) anew and differently. To be more precise, "deconstruction"
means initiating within that discourse as which the West presents itself a discus-
sion with what Heidegger calls Being, and Lacan and Lvinas like to call "the
Other" (l'Autre). Deconstruction to this extent resembles psychoanalysis, which
also questions each utterance in regard to what is actually "thought" in it beyond
its "manifest content." In this sense we can say that Derrida, even in his criticism
of the concept of the subject, always takes cognizance of that voice that ac-
knowledges the subject even if only in the form of its repression.
So much for the critique of metaphysics. Another point of agreement between
analytical and neostructuralist philosophy is discernible in the fact that both
movements presuppose the so-called linguistic turn. In a moment I will become
more specific about this point, supporting my arguments on the basis of Derrida's
texts. But we already know from our previous reading of Saussure, and from what
we learned about Schleiermacher and Wittgenstein, that the linguistic turn con-
sists in the transferral of the philosophical paradigm of consciousness onto that
of the sign. It is no longer consciousness that is the transcendental place of the
"condition of possibility" for meaning, significance, and reference, rather it is the
sign. Transcendental philosophy is transformed or dissolved into semiology, i.e.,
into the theory of signs. This transpires because, in order to be able to set itself
218 D LECTURE 14
off in its own identity from other thoughts, a thought (even the thought of myself
as subject) needs to be articulated; i.e., it must go through the "parade of the sig-
nifier." Analytical philosophy concurs with this, just as does the hermeneutics of
the younger Frankfurt School (Karl-Otto Apel, Jiirgen Habermas, Alfred Loren-
zer, and others).
The third and last point of agreement that we could detect between neo-
structuralism and analytical philosophy concerns their common critique of the
representational model of language. This model supposes that to speak means to
mimetically represent (abbilden) thoughts or ideas by means of words. Wittgen-
stein demonstrates in radical fashion the untenability of this view, which he him-
self had held at an earlier stage of his philosophizing. The frequently varied prem-
ise of his later philosophy states, after all, that the significance of a word does
not consist in its correspondence with a thought or a perception, but rather that
this significance makes itself manifest in the "rule for its usage." This is also the
case for the concept of self-consciousness. In fact, for a long time self-
consciousness had been interpreted according to the model of the relationship of
a subject to an object, whereby in the case of self-consciousness the object would
simply be the subject itself (the classical instance of reflection). Apart from the
fact that the reflectional model is contradictory in itself, it is also untenable for
language-philosophical reasons because it attempts to reduce consciousness
to acts of (sensual or mental) perception (Anschauung). In the case of self-
consciousness we are merely dealing with a kind of "inner viewing" or "inner per-
ception." The fallaciousness of this can be demonstrated by a reflection on our
use of language. Tugendhat devoted particular attention to it in the lectures men-
tioned earlier. There is, according to him, no objectivity, not even of a subject,
that is independent of language, and this is so because we cannot determine what
is meant by objectivity or "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt) without referring back
to propositions and their meanings (Bedeutungen). Only within a language can
something have meaning (Bedeutung), for meaning is nothing other than a non-
autonomous component of the use of signs.
3
Tugendhat reproaches Husserl's
analysis of intentionality for having neglected this fact in particularly drastic fash-
ion,
4
and it is interesting to note in this respect the parallel to Derrida. In order
to make this more apparent, I have specifically selected Tugendhat as a represen-
tative of analytical philosophy, since both he and Derrida derive their positions
from a critique of the model of language-independent consciousness la Husserl.
This phenomenological model assumes that the "positing" (das meinende) (inten-
tional) consciousness is immediately "directed" toward the "states of affairs" or
"facts" of the real or imagined world. Let's first look at what Tugendhat objects
to in this position, so that we can then compare his critique of consciousness from
the perspective of the philosophy of language with Derrida's critique of Husserl.
Tugendhat asserts that propositions in which intentional "acts" or "experi-
ences" are articulated are not two-part, but rather three-part: they express the re-
LECTURE 14 219
lation of an intention not with regard to an object, but rather with regard to a "state
of affairs." A "state of affairs," however, is nothing to which one could refer by
means of nominal expressions; it is itself something synthetic that is made up of
at least two elements: the object of a "singular term," and its characterization by
means of an act of predication. In other words, a "state of affairs" is not a thing
(Sache); rather it is a judgment about a thing by means of predication: "It is the
case for A that it is b."
In reality I never see things, as the model of intentionality suggests, but always
only states of affairs, i.e., complex things or things that are immediately furnished
with properties. (I do not, for example, as Husserl wants us to believe, first see
the castle in Heidelberg and only subsequently synthesize this perception with the
perception that it is also red; on the contrary, the proposition by means of which
the states of affairs are expressed is both the cognitive and the semantic minimum
of all intending and speaking about objects of consciousness.)
5
If this is the case,
then I will have to make corrections with regard to the notion of "seeing some-
thing": I do not see something (whereby "something" stands for an object that can
be expressed by a "sigular term"); rather I see that something is the case (expressi-
ble by means of a propositional expression). What analytical philosophers call the
pwpositional attitude is the basic form of all intentional consciousness, including
even self-consciousness. Thus for me as well it is the case that when I reflect on
my internal states, I do it in the following way: "I know (feel, sense, or under-
stand, etc.) that I p"; I do not "look at my feeling, my thinking, or my perceiving."
On this Tugendhat remarks:
The evidence that all intentional consciousness is propositional lends the
analytical program of a theory of the proposition an additional historical
value: just as the ontological question about being as being dissolves
into the question about understanding the proposition, the question of
consciousness dissolves into the question of propositional under-
standing."
6
Tugendhat returned to this topic in his lectures on self-consciousness and self-
determination. In the introductory lecture he once again (critically) refers to Hus-
serl, who described self-consciousnes in analogy to the consciousness we direct
toward objects ("intentional experiences" like perceiving, knowing, loving, desir-
ing, intending, i.e., those experiences our language constructs by means of a di-
rect object). To be sure, Husserl rejected with regard to intentionality the crude
representational model: consciousness does not furnish us with something like a
representative in the sense of a placeholder (Stellvertreter) for the object; rather
it "constitutes" it (and even this it accomplishes with the restriction that it does
not find out anything about its existence, but only about its essence). In a stricter
sense, however, Husserl does not really get away from the representational
model: he considers the "directedness of consciousness towards . . ." to be the
220 D LECTURE 14
relation of a conscious subject to an object. The metaphor of sight, a metaphor
that itself has an old Western tradition (vosv, tfepEv, evai, a, etc., are
expressions that originally designated sensory perception), serves him as a model
for thought. Husserl knows that the object of consciousness is a state of affairs
and thus something complex. However, he believes that he can take account of
this fact by declaring that the object of consciousness is composed of synthetic
acts, composed, for example, of syntheses of acts that constitute the object itself,
and acts that constitute its conditionedness {Zustndlichkeit). The same is true for
self-consciousness: Husserl takes it to be the synthesis of an invariant ego pole
and a varying set of consciousness experiences that are coordinated with it. Be-
hind all this, as we know, is the model of direct representing (Vorstellen) or see-
ing. Yet this model, according to Tugendhat, stands in contradiction to the way
in which self-consciousness is given to us as language.
If we look at relations of consciousness such as wishing, meaning,
knowing, intending, fearing, then we realize that their grammatical ob-
ject is never an expression that designates a common object, a
spatiotemporal object; rather we see that their grammatical object is al-
ways a nominalized proposition. One cannot wish, know, etc.,
spatiotemporal objects; if one expresses a wish, one always wishes that
something is or would be the case; the expression "I know" cannot be
supplemented by expressions such as "the chair," "Mr. X," etc.; I know
rather "that it is raining today," or "that this chair is brown," or even
"that there is a chair standing there."
7
The "something" at which the expressions of intentional consciousness are
directed, then, is not an object, but a contracted (a nominalized)proposition: "that
p (is the case)," for example, "that it is raining today," "that I'm feeling well," "that
I'm looking at you," etc. Objects of this sort (contracted propositions) Husserl
called Sachverhalte, the Anglo-Saxon tradition speaks of "propositions," "and in
British philosophy those intentional experiences whose objects are propositions,
i.e., attitudes toward 'propositions
1
or 'states of affairs,' are therefore called
propositional attitudes ."
8
This is also true, according to Tugendhat, for those intentional acts that thema-
tize (reflect) themselves. The "something" in the structure of "consciousness of
something" is in this instance also a contracted or abridged proposition: "it has
or implies the structure consciousness that p."
9
If self-consciousness, as Tugenhat
further assumes, is a form of knowledge, then it is also true that it exhibits the
structure knowledge that p. One cannot, accordingly, know an experience (Er-
iebnis); rather one can only know that someone (e.g., I myself) takes part in it.
This then implies that there can be no knowledge of an isolated self (of an "I"),
but only of a cognitive, emotional, or volitional state of affairs, whose mode of
Being analysis of language discloses to be that of a linguistic entity-that of a
LECTURE 14 221
proposition. In this sense it is quite clear that analytical philosophy passionately
takes exception to the idea that there is something like a nonpropositional
(and thus translinguistic) intentional consciousness, self-consciousness included.
(Here I am passing over the fact that Tugendhat is faithful to Husserl insofar as
he still takes self-consciousness falsely to be a special case of the positing con-
sciousness, i.e., to be an act of reflection, a principally identifiable object of
knowledge.)
With these references to Wittgenstein and Tugendhat I want to conclude the
section of my lectures dedicated to the epistemological prehistory of neostruc-
turalism's theory of the subject. My intention was to make evident that there never
was a radical break or a new beginning; rather we discover here one of the numer-
ous transformations by means of which a new form of thinking connects with an
existing formation of knowledge, partly preserving it and partly transfiguring it.
The idea of a radical beginning is in itself contradictory, for any "beginning" must
evolve on the basis of language (a historical-epistemic a priori) whose signs it can
twist and transmute, but never create (anew) in their entirety.
Derrida does not have much to say about Wittgenstein, or about Ernst Tugend-
hat, for that matter. He has, however, concerned himself considerably with a cer-
tain movement in Anglo-Saxon pragmatics that is based on Wittgenstein, namely,
with Austin's and Searle's speech-act theory. In his retort to Searle's criticism of
the lecture he delivered in Montreal in August 1971,
10
he says about the theory:
Among the many reasons that make me unqualified to represent a
"prominent philosophical tradition," there is this one: I consider myself
to be in many respects quite close to Austin, both interested in and in-
debted to his problematic. This is said in Sec, very clearly. . . .
Above all, however, when I do raise questions or objections, it is al-
ways at points where I recognize in Austin's theory presuppositions
which are the most tenacious and the most central presuppositions of
the continental metaphysical tradition. . . . Signature Event Context
analyses the metaphysical premises of the Anglo-Saxonand fundamen-
tally moralistic-theory of the performative, of speech acts or discur-
sive events. In France, it seems to me that these premises underlie
the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and the archaeology of Foucault. (L/,
172, 173)
Here Derrida concedes that he stands in very close proximity to analytical prag-
matics; indeed, that he is indebted to it. Yet he claims at the same time not to be
part of the metaphysical tradition evident in it. This certainly does not mean that
one might simply be able to escape this tradition. On the contrary, Derrida em-
phasized again and again that discussions of Western grammar cannot simply put
its game rules out of action: speech that does not make use of traditional grammar
would be forced to express itself in "monstrous" ways. Derrida does, however,
222 LECTURE 14
claim to diagnose the metaphysical tradition as that which it actually is. Thereby
he links up with a tradition that has already prepared his "discourse," namely, that
tradition for which the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are exemplary.
Let's examine by means of a concrete example just how Derrida employs his
deconstructive hcrmeneutics. The metaphysical tradition of the langage hrit
cannot be eliminated, and Derrida's remarks about Husserl are just as valid for
Derrida himself.
The unity of ordinary language (or the language of traditional
metaphysics) and the language of phenomenology is never broken in
spite of the precautions, the "brackets," the renovations or innovations.
Transforming a traditional concept into an indicative or metaphorical
concept does not eliminate its heritage; it imposes questions, rather, to
which Husserl never ventured a response.
11
Derrida also depends heavily on the metaphysical tradition, and he discusses its
classical themes: sign, self-reference, the relation of transcendental and empirical
world, etc. However, he does it in such a way that he estranges his subject matter
by means of an interpretive procedure that goes against the grain, a procedure
that from the standpoint of phenomenology appears to be a distortion, but which
from the perspective of diagnostics, however, seems to divulge profitable new
recognitions.
Unfortunately, Derrida has not yet published a text whose sole thematic em-
phasis is that which concerns us most at the moment: the problematics of (mod-
ern) subjectivity. Therefore we will have to rely on texts that consider this
question if with special attentiveness as one among others. I am intentionally
taking as my point of entry (mainly, although not solely) Derrida's earliest publi-
cations, namely his introduction to Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry,
12
and
his work on Husserl's theory of signs {Speech and Phenomena). The basic ideas
of both works are summarized (or supported through the examples of other texts
by Husserl) in his interview with Julia Kristeva ("Semiology and Grammatol-
gy")> which we discussed earlier, as well as in the two essays " 'Genesis and
Structure' and Phenomenology" {WD, 154-68) and "Form and Meaning" {Mar-
gins, 155-73).
It makes sense for us to orient our investigation around these texts, not only
because we can thereby become aware of the genesis of Derrida's thought, but
also because Derrida's treatment of the concept of the subject is developed pre-
cisely on the example of Husserl, just as Ernst Tugendhat explicitly developed
his analytical countermove as a reaction against Husserl's idealist explanation of
the constitution of "states of affairs." In this way the line, which is by no means
easy to draw, between the analytical and the neostructuralist "critique of mean-
ing" {Sinnkritik) becomes visible.
Those works by Derrida devoted to Husserl exhibit, judged within the context
LECTURE 14 223
of neostructuralist texts in general, an exceptional clarity. One can scarcely re-
proach them with the claim that they thrust upon their subject matter conse-
quences that are completely foreign to it. On the contrary, in his readings of Hus-
serl Derrida is amplifying a voice resonant in Husserl's texts themselves, but one
which can assert itself against the epistemic framework of his philosophizing only
with great effort. It is this less apparent aspect of-and in-Husserl's works that
interests Derrida the most.
Derrida's ideas are discriminating and he develops them in small argumenta-
tive steps. Therefore it seems useful first to provide a global survey of his position
and particularly of the themes that he treats most thoroughly. In a second step we
can then supplement this rough framework with the necessary refinements.
First of all, one has to know that Derridamuch like Tugendhatapproaches
the phenomenon of "self-consciousness" or "subjectivity" from the angle of the
so-called experiences of consciousness or states of consciousness. Derrida tries
to demonstrate that Husserl believed it was possible to distinguish a "preexpres-
sive" stratum from an expressive stratum in these "states of consciousness." The
consciousness experience, according to this, would thus be cognizant of its mean-
ing or its signification even before it is consigned to the expressive substance
(Ausdruckskrpef).
2. This layer of pure meaning, or a pure signified, refers, explicitly in
Husserl and at least implicitly in semiotic practice, to a layer of prelin-
guistic or presemiotic (preexpressive, Husserl calls it) meaning whose
presence would be conceivable outside and before the work of diffr-
ance, outside and before the process or system of signification. (P, 31)
As in Tugendhat's critique of Husserl, it is the idea of a presemiotic internal per-
ception against which Derrida lashes out. In his opinion, meaning can be formed
only in a language, and language generates its significations by means of the
differentiations of expressions.
We are already acquainted with this sort of critique of the paradigm of a
language-independent transcendental consciousness from the works of Herder,
Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and, of course, Saussure. In contrast to Tugendhat,
Derrida acknowledges this tradition at least in part. Already in his earliest longer
text, in his introduction to Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, he pointed in
a longer footnote to Herder's role as predecessor.
Did not Herder, in his Verstand und Erfahrung: Eine Metakritik zur
Kritik der reinen Vernunft . . . already reproach Kant for not taking
into consideration the intrinsic necessity of language and its immanence
in the most apriori act of thought? (OG, 70)
224 LECTURE 14
Herder's criticism of Kant thus appears as an argumentative parallel to Derrida's
critique of Husserl. The only difference is that Derrida does not simply criticize
Husserl; rather he merely demonstrates that, and to what extent, this nonreduci-
bility of language becomes a problem for Husserl himself. On the other hand,
Husserl leaves no doubt that, to his mind, "it would be absurd for sense not to
precedede jure (and here de jure is difficult to make clear [une vidence dif-
ficile]) the act of language whose own value will always be that of expression"
(OG, 69). On the other hand, it by no means escapes Husserl when he discusses
language that "[language] offers the most dangerous resistance to the phenomeno-
logical reduction, and transcendental discourse will remain irreducibly obliter-
ated by a certain ambiguous worldliness" (0G, 68-69). In a certain sense, lan-
guage is the condition of possibility for the phenomenological reduction, and if
this is true, then transcendental consciousness is not the appropriate authority to
turn to when one abstracts from language.
It is rather significant that every critical enterprise, juridicial or tran-
scendental, is made vulnerable by the irreducible factuality and the nat-
ural naivete of its language. We become conscious of this vulnerability
or of this vocation to silence in a second reflection on the possibility of
the juridico-transcendental regression itself. . . . Attentiveness to the
"fact" of language in which a juridical thought lets itself be transcribed,
in which juridicalness would like to be completely transparent, is a re-
turn to factuality as the de jure character of the de jure itself. It is a
reduction of the reduction and opens the way to an infinite discursive-
ness. (69-70)
We will have to take a closer look at the thoughts that lead to this conclusion. But
that belongs to those refinements that we still have to append to our initial orienta-
tional framework. First of all, however, we want to look at how Husserl actually
develops his thesis of the preexpressivity of meaning, and only then will we ex-
amine how Derrida uncovers its contradictoriness.
Husserl discusses the relationship between intentional and expressive acts in
the clearest and most compact fashion in sections 124 to 127 of his Ideas: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology .
u
In this text he writes of "pre-expressive
intentions," i.e., acts of consciousness that are directed at ideal objectivities and
that possess knowledge about themselves, yet which are not linguistically articu-
lated. Such a preexpressive intention, Derrida remarks, would be "a presence to
itself of the subject in a silent and intuitive consciousness" (Margins, 16). Husserl
assumes, as we stated earlier, that there actually is something like this, but, by
the same token, he insists that he wants to explain not only the preexpressivity
of intentional acts but also their relation to linguistic expressions. He is both
amazed that preexpressive meaning and expression can "coincide," and amazed
about the manner in which this occurs, and he concludes that "we clearly have
LECTURE 14 225
title-headings here indicated for phenomenological problems that are not unim-
portant" (Ideas, 319). In order to eliminate these problems at the outset, Husserl
takes flight into the metaphor of interwovenness (Verwebung): meaning and ex-
pression, he says, are interwoven (318).
Husserl does not feel entirely comfortable with the choice of this metaphor,
whose "unavoidable ambiguity" rather disturbs him (318). "Ambiguity is danger-
ous," he continues, however, "only so long as it is not known to be such, or the
parallel structures have not been kept apart" (319). By parallel structures he
means 1) the "expressing stratum," as the "logical act-stratum" or pure "inten-
tional meaning," and 2) the stratum that "suffers expression," i.e., the linguistic
stratum (318 and 322). We can already tell from this formulation how Husserl
hopes to be able to uphold the notion that the intending and the expressing theses
are in fact unitary: only the stratum of expression, he asserts, is active and
productive. "The stratum of expression-and this constitutes its peculiarity-
apart from the fact that it lends expression to all other intentionalities, is not
productive" (321). Thus the act of meaning production seems to move unidirec-
tionally from the "non-sensory 'mental' aspect" to the "sensory, the so to speak
bodily aspect of expression" (319). Husserl also differentiates between the two
aspects by calling them the "lower stratum" and the "upper stratum." On the other
hand, he concedes that
the attempt to clarify here the relevant structures meets with considera-
ble difficulties. Already the recognition that after abstracting from the
stratum of sensory verbal sound, there lies before us in reality still an-
other layer which we here presuppose, thus in every case even in that
of a thinking that is ever so vague, empty, and merely verbal a stra-
tum of meaning that expresses, and a substratum of expressed
meaning-is not one that is easy to make, nor again is the understand-
ing of the essential connexions of these stratifications easy. For we
should not hold too hard by the metaphor of stratification; expression is
not of the nature of an overlaid varnish or covering garment; it is a
mental (geistige) formation, which exercises new intentional influences
(Funktioneri) on the intentional substratum and experiences from the lat-
ter correlative intentional influences. (322)
Although Husserl does not escape the representational model of language, neither
does he welcome it. What is so remarkable about the foregoing passage, to be
sure, is that it abjures the thesis of the relative passivity of the expressing stratum
contained in the spirit of the metaphor of interweaving: not only does the inten-
tional substratum stamp itself in the expressive upper stratum, but this sensory
upper stratum also exercises a certain retroactive effect on the "intentional func-
tion." This is confirmed when Husserl writes of a "remarkable blending together"
of both strata. "From the noetic standpoint the rubric 'expressing' should indicate
226 D LECTURE 14
a special act-stratum to which all other acts must adjust themselves in their own
way, and with which they must blend remarkably in such wise that every noe-
matic act-meaning, and consequently the relation to objectivity which lies in it,
stamps itself'conceptually
1
in the noematic phase of the expressing" (320). Only
substances of the same order can be blended together, not something productive
with something unproductive. Blending or interweaving of meaning and expres-
sion: that would be something quite different from a mere "mirroring" of one in
the other ("reflecting back as from a mirror"; 320). In the case of mirroring, one
element is the mere copy of the other and, therefore, not autonomous in itself.
In the case of interweaving, however, there are two equally autonomous compo-
nents: woof and warp, which literally are woven (Latin, texere) to form a cloth,
a textile.
It is precisely at this point that Derrida inserts his critique, and he does so by
spelling out the implications of the metaphor of interweaving {texere). The
"bodily stratum," he says, can be "blended together" with the preexpressive act
(the meaning) of the "animating intention" (thus with the "non-sensory, 'mental'
aspect" of the sign) only according to a textual order, for example, according to
a language (understood not as a system of expressions but rather as a system of
signs, i.e., of syntheses of meaning and expression).
The interweaving {Verwebung) of language, the interweaving of that
which is purely language in language with the other threads of ex-
perience constitutes a cloth. The word Verwebung refers to this
metaphorical zone. The "strata" are "woven," their intercomplication is
such that the warp cannot be distinguished from the woof. If the stra-
tum of the logos were simply founded, one could extract it and bring to
light its underlying stratum of nonexpressive acts and contents. But
since this superstructure acts back upon the Unterschicht in an essential
and decisive manner, one is indeed obliged, from the very outset of the
description, to associate a properly textual metaphor with the geological
metaphor: for cloth means text. Verweben here means textere. The dis-
cursive is related to the nondiscursive, the linguistic "stratum" is inter-
mixed with the prelinguistic "stratum" according to the regulated system
of a kind of text. {Margins, 160)
Derrida then shows that Husserl can avoid this consequence only with
difficulty and only at the price of certain contradictions when he asserts that
the "expressing stratum . . . is completely one in essence with that which finds
expression, and in the covering process absorbs its essence" {Ideas, 321-22). In
order to explain this unity, Husserl extends the meaning of the word Sinn ("Sense
or Meaning simpliciter"; Ideas, 319) to make it include the entire noematic aspect
(i.e., the signified aspect, understood in a limited sense) of all experiences (in-
dependent of whether they are actually expressed or only silently intended
[gemeint]), and he declares the expressive "meaning something" {Bedeuten) to be
LECTURE 14 227
an actual reproduction of the preexpressive "meaning" (Sinn).
14
"Thus, sense al-
ready would be a kind of blank and mute writing redoubling itself in meaning"
(Margins, 165). The one-sidedness of this explanation in fact only shifts the prob-
lem of how a sign is formed from the "bodily" aspect of expression to the aspect
of "nonsensory" meaning, without escaping the semiotic conclusion that even
meaning, if it is conceived as a distinct quantity, has to inscribe itself into a
differential texture that has the constitution of a text. At this moment, however,
the difference between inside and outside collapses: meaning is that which is ex-
pressible according to its essence, "and when the two cover each other we find
not two theses to be kept separate, but one thesis only (Ideas, 322).
15
At this point Husserl himself runs up against the conclusion that he so painstak-
ingly tried to avoid, namely, that there can be no preexpressive meaning (Meinen)
because, first of all, all meaning (Meinen) is a function of the use of significations
(Bedeutungen), and, second, because significations, for their part, are interwoven
with expressions. The smallest and most elementary unit of all thought is the sign;
only prelinguistic self-perception has to be excluded.
This is the first result of Derrida's reading of Husserl that we want to take note
of: meaning attains to consciousness of itself not through some mysterious inter-
nal perception (Anschauung) but rather, on the contrary, by means of a total ex-
teriorization onto the stratum of expression: exteriority of expression is always
prior to the internalness of its signifying (Bedeuteri). Husserl succumbs all the
more to this conclusion against his own will since in principle he always held
on to the representational model of consciousness: his differentiation between no-
esis and noema turns out to be a mere transformation of the classical distinction
between subject and object. If one assumes on top of this, as Husserl does, that
noesis always finds out what it is only from a subsequent reflection onto itself or
based on the way its noema is constituted, then one arrives at the conclusion that
there can be no immediate (i.e., prereflective) self-consciousness of intentional
acts. Moreover, if it is true that the distinction among noemata themselves is pos-
sible only on the basis of distinctions among expressions, then not only is there
no immediate self-consciousness of intentional acts, there is also no prelinguistic
self-consciousness of intentional acts. Thus the fact that Husserl holds on to the
model of self-consciousness as reflection leads him first to the insight into the in-
terwovenness of meaning and expression, and from there to the unintended con-
clusion that all consciousness, including consciousness that is conscious of itself,
is dependent on language.
In highlighting this point, Derrida is not only more consistent than Husserl
himself; he can justifiably claim that his reading of Husserl develops the internal
consequences of phenomenology only by going beyond the metaphysical obsta-
cles put in place by Husserfs idealism, and that in so doing he does it justice. The
fact that he respects HusserFs premises, however, has its price for Derrida's
thought: by developing the consequences of the model of self-consciousness as
IDS U L^ LI UKL If
reflection he mutatis mutandis still upholds this model in itself undisturbed.
This model assumes that consciousness finds out only in retrospect what it is, as
the result of an explicit self-thematization. This is an epistemological premise that
Hegel's dialectics and Husserl's phenomenology have in common. Derrida's
thought shares this premise in a modified form, for he too assumes that conscious-
ness learns its meaning (Bedeutung) from the reflection of signs, and that it does
not invest at a stage preliminary to this in the deciphering of its signs. Based on
this we can understand how he can concede with regard to Hegel that there are
"relations of profound affinity that diffrance thus written maintains with
Hegelian discourse" {Margins, 14; translation modified). We will see to what ex-
tent this minimal consensus between Hegel, Husserl, and Derrida also involuntar-
ily furnishes Derrida's thought with a historical index and limits its validity.
With this projected task, however, we are going considerably beyond that
which we have been able to demonstrate thus far, namely, that the idea of a
language-independent consciousness is an illusion. Our intention, however,
reaches much further than merely to this not particularly exciting insight. We are
not so much concerned with consciousness, as we are with self-consciousness.
Therefore we have to return to Husserl's text and read him along with
Derrida-more thoroughly than before.
Lecture 15
In the last lecture we found that our assertion of a profound connection between
the linguistic turn of analytical philosophy and that of neostructuralism could be
confirmed. And the fact that individual representatives from the analytical and ne-
ostructuralist camps-for example, Ernst Tugendhat and Jacques Derrida -
established their positions by means of a critique of Husserl underlined the affinity
between the two movements. Both Tugendhat and Derrida take exception to the
idea that consciousness is a kind of perception (Anschauung) and that, cor-
respondingly, self-consciousness is a kind of internal perception. The subject-
object scheme accounts neither for the fact that the elementary data of conscious-
ness are states of affairs rather than things (i.e., entities that are articulated in
propositions), nor for the fact that intentional acts can acquire significance only
within a language. The meaning of an intention is the minimum of what could
be conscious to a consciousness, and this meaning only occurs "interwoven" with
an expression, i.e., in the form of a sign that is differentially distinguished from
other signs.
However, we are not so much concerned with the theory of consciousness (and
the consequence that it is only possible as a theory of language) as with the ques-
tion of a neostructuralist theory of ^//-consciousness. This question can also be
addressed by following the thread of Derrida's reading of Husserl, and, in fact,
the answer emerges as a consequence of Husserl's theory of consciousness. This
has to do with the fact that Husserl considers self-consciousness to be a special
case of consciousness, that is, as its self-reflection. Derrida follows him in this
respect, although with a deconstructive intent.
230 D LECTURE 15
We observed earlier that the meaning of the expression "self-consciousness"
does not coincide with the meaning of the expression "I," or at least does not have
to coincide with it. Subjectivity (in the sense of I-ness [Ichheit]) is not the same
as consciousness, even though it presupposes consciousness as the dimension in
which it can evolve. At any rate, it is clear that one does not necessarily have to
deconstruct the concept of the subject in order to demonstrate that consciousness
experiences acquire their meaning only within a language.
As a matter of fact, self-consciousness in the sense of I-ness was never a cen-
tral problem in Husserl's philosophy, in contrast to Fichte's idealism or Sartre's
phenomenology, for example. Perhaps it was only his encounter with neo-
Kantianism (which still viewed the transcendental ego as the only explanation for
the unification of the material of experience) that led Husserl eventually to inte-
grate (particularly in the confrontation with Paul Natorp) the notion of a "tran-
scendental ego" or a "pure ego pole" into his reflections. And to this extent Der-
rida is quite correct in observing that
Husserl in the end never asked what it [consciousness of oneself or con-
sciousness in general] was, in spite of the admirable, interminable, and
in so many respects revolutionary, meditation he devoted to it. (SP, 15)
If "self-consciousness" itself never became a cardinal problem in Husserl's
thought, that still does not mean that this theorem does not serve a decisive Junc-
tion in his phenomenology. In order to give a preliminary characterization of this
function, we can say that it allows intentional acts, with which Husserl is
concerned, to have a pure self-referentiality. We want to define a "pure self-
reference" as the potential of the consciousness experience to refer back to itself
without having to come into contact with the empirical, the material, and, above
all, the linguistic world. The phenomenological attitude-to be sure, only as a
methodological proceduresystematically disregards external reality, linguisti-
cally, transcendence, and the materiality of the body. Husserl calls this process
of setting aside no%r\ or also "reduction," i.e., the disconnection of existence and
concentration on "pure intuition," on that which is "given" to consciousness acts
in themselves, wholly independent of the question of any reality that extends be-
yond this (which Husserl calls "transcendence"). This disconnection, of course,
has to be founded philosophically; it implies Husserl's opting for a kind of ideal-
ism that rigorously limits "the validity" of its statements to that which reveals itself
as valid to the "internal life of consciousness."
1
One can speak of an internal life,
of course, only when it is juxtaposed with an external life; Husserl calls this exter-
nal life (of consciousness) "the psychical." It is the result of a "self-Objectivation"
(CM, 26, 131), or, to be more precise, a "mundanizing self-apperception": "by
virtue of this mundanization everything included in the ownness belonging to me
transcendentally (as this ultimate ego) enters, as something psychic, into 'my psy-
che" " (99-100). This implies that the psycho-physical (and the personal) ego is
LECTURE 15 231
something derivative over against the transcendental ego. Husserl calls it a "com-
ponent pertaining to my world-apperception," and, therefore, it is "something
transcendentally secondary" ( 100), an "tre au milieu du monde," as Sartre would
say. In other words, it is a being of the sort of inner-worldly existing objects of
which the pure transcendental ego is conscious, which themselves, however, by
no means have consciousness of their own mode of Being. Because the transcen-
dental ego can refer back to itself without having to come into contact with the
domain of the psychic ego or with mundane reality, it founds itself as an absolute
principle, i.e., as something internal that is antecedent to any exteriority. To be
more precise, it founds itself as something internal that does not owe its knowl-
edge of itself to the mediation of something external. Husserl repeatedly charac-
terizes this /mmediate (i.e., nonmediated) self-knowledge, acquired neither
through signs nor through objects, by means of metaphors of presence: as
Being present to itself [sich-gegenwrtig-sein], as living present, as self-ap-
presentation, etc. This figurative language, according to Derrida, is not simply
an unsuspected residue of traditional philosophical terminology; rather it implies
a "metaphysical presupposition," indeed "a dogmatic or speculative commit-
ment," that inherently constitutes phenomenology
from within, in its project of criticism and in the instructive value of its
own premises . . . precisely in what soon comes to be recognized as
the source and guarantee of all value, the "principle of principles": i.e.,
the original self-giving evidence, the present or presence of sense to a
full and primordial intuition. (SP, 5)
I mentioned earlier that the potential of consciousness to make itself present
to itself without contact with the world serves less a thematic than a theory-
constitutive function for phenomenology. We can now indicate more precisely
what function it is a matter of: pure self-consciousness guarantees the idea of a
purely ideal world (idalit), i.e., "what may be indefinitely repeated in the iden-
tity of its presence, because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not real or
is irreaF (SP, 6), and this is to be taken not in the sense of a mere fiction but rather
in the sense of a transreality that goes infinitely beyond all aspects of mundane
being. According to Derrida, this idea exhibits the most profound desire of that
sort of thinking that is articulated in the project of metaphysics, namely, the desire
for a mysterious bodyless self-appresentation, which is evident in Aristotle's de-
finition of the divine spirit as a vriai vofjaeco, all the way to Hegel's "self-
consciousness of the absolute spirit"; this metaphysical desire has left its imprint
on phenomenology as well.
2
The bodily, the external, the worldly always appear
as the reprehensible side of a distinction that is virtualized with great effort. Of
course there is the body, the world, the external, the nonpresent, the Other, and
temporality. But if one presupposes that absolute self-consciousness exteriorizes
itself in all these entities, then this sphere of exteriority appears either as some-
232 LECTURE 15
thing posited, derived, and secondary, or as something that is merely virtual.
However, an opposition that has the unity of self-consciousness as its prerequisite
can no more endanger this unity itself than can a merely virtual opposition; i.e.,
an opposition that attains no autonomy over against the transcendental ego, but
that is rather inscribed in it. In the latter case the "psychic life" would not be an-
other life that stands opposed to the "inner life of the transcendental self"; rather
it would be the Other of itself. The point of this formulation is that the difference
between the ideal and the real, the internal and the external, the mental and the
physical, etc., which is inscribed in the self, can never bring into play something
that is independent of the self; for the Other is already taken into account from
the outset as the other side of the self, i.e., as the Same. The division between
the transcendental and the psychic ego ultimately is incorporated into the sphere
of "transcendental life" itself.
One finds out quickly enough that the sole nucleus of the concept of
psych is as self-relationship, whether or not it takes place in the form
of consciousness. "Living" is thus the name of that which precedes the
reduction and finally escapes all the divisions which the latter gives rise
to. But this is precisely because it is its own division and its own oppo-
sition to its other. (SP, 14-15)
Without getting bogged down in the details of Husserl's theory of consciousness,
we want to emphasize its theory-constitutive function. It consists precisely in the
fact that it allows "bodily nature" (Krperlichkeit) for example, that of language
that expresses the consciousness experiences to be sublated and reinterpreted as
"flesh" (Leiblichkeit), or, to be more precise, as "spiritual flesh," which in the
midst of its exteriority rescues pure self-reference and thereby escapes world-
liness.
The phenomenological voice would be this spiritual flesh that continues
to speak and be present to itself to hear itself in the absence of the
world. (16)
Derrida, of course, is mainly interested in the bodily aspect of language, its
materiality that can never be entirely dissolved into spirituality. If it were the case
that its bodily aspectmuch as the remainder of the physical worldcould be dis-
connected by means of the transcendental reduction, then a whole domain of
"preexpressive" meaning would be secured, a world of pure signifieds not borne
by signifiers. At the same time, the preeminence of difference for the production
of meaning would be challenged, for if there is meaning of consciousness ex-
periences in pure "self-presence," then for this sphere of meaning, at least, what
holds for all other significations does not seem to be the case, namely, that they
can be produced only on the basis of unequivocal distinctions among their physi-
cal substrates, i.e., on the basis of differences among their signifiers.
LECTURE 15 233
Indeed, transcendental life knows no differentiation and is nevertheless im-
mediately conscious of itself. But does this description truly hit the mark? Is self-
consciousness really a nondifferential entity? Husserl, at any rate, does not admit
any other conception of self-consciousness than that of reflection. Reflection, as
we saw, is something mediate: the reference of a consciousness to itself. If one
pays attention to the language by means of which this mediation is articulated,
then one cannot help but notice that Husserl is talking about two poles between
which reflection mediates: between the pole of the subject of reflection, and the
pole of the object of reflection; between that which reflects, and that which is
reflected. This duality is already implied in the semantics of the pronouns "self
and "itself (selbst/sich): something refers to itself, but mediately, by taking a de-
tour. Husserl constantly described transcendental consciousness-life as some-
thing mediate in this sense, as a relation of reflection, as the "place of reflexive
articulation, i.e., the mediation of a Logos retaking possession of itself through
this consciousness" (OG, 146). A consciousness that has to bridge a difference
in order to become consciousness of itself can hardly be defined as predifferential.
Yet Husserl would not dispute this internal differentiality of self-consciousness
(contrary to his teacher Franz Brentano, Husserl describes self-consciousness as
self-relation). He would, however, emphasize that in the case of this differential-
ity of self-consciousness, it is actually only a matter of a virtual difference, i.e.,
of a difference that evolves only on the basis of a prior unity, and that remains
bound up with this unity. If the Other exists only as the Other of itself, then it
is inscribed in the sphere of the self and thus could not possibly assert any inde-
pendence of it. (Difference stands in relation to a unity, and the latter is the deci-
sive factor.)
If Husserl's characterization were correct, then self-consciousness in its total-
ity would have to be something merely virtual, for reality presupposes determina-
tion, and differentiation is a necessary part of determination. In order for differen-
tiation to be able to become effective, it for its part would have to be real. A real
opposition, however, would necessarily explode the shackle in which unity en-
closes difference in self-consciousness. Thus the elimination of the physical from
the sphere of pure ideality takes its revenge by making self-consciousness into an
unreal element, depriving it of its Being. Even if it were the case that in self-
consciousness unity describes a circle around the difference of the two connected
components (in order to guarantee the sameness of their meaning), this unity itself
would still first of all have to be. A consciousness that is not real would not be;
i.e., it would be no consciousness. The idea of a merely virtual consciousness an-
nuls itself; there is a consciousness of virtualities, but no virtual consciousness.
If' consciousness experience is given, then it is given; i.e., it no longer exists
as potentiality, but rather as act(uality). In order to provide this actuality for self-
consciousness, one would have to introduce into it an existing difference; this,
234 LECTURE 15
however, would destroy both its claim to being the "principle of principles," and
the assertion of its absolute "primordiality."
At the heart of what ties together these two decisive moments of
description we recognize an irreducible nonpresence as having a con-
stituting value, and with it a nonlife, a nonpresence of nonself-
belonging of the living present, an ineradicable nonprimordiality. (SP,
6-7)
Derrida considers this to be an immediate consequence of the model of a reflective
consciousness. To be sure, reflection means mirroring (Widerspiegelung). This
model seeks to guarantee the unity of the divided consciousness by transforming
the Other into the Other of itself. To accomplish this, however, reflection has to
(temporarily) surrender itself to the reality of the opposition, to the division, and
to the nonsimultaneity of the two moments of consciousness (Bewusstseins-
Relate). Once delivered over to the medium of reality, of temporal sequentiality,
and of contrast, reflection can no longer return to the sphere of pure ideality and
instantaneousness, at least as long as this sphere is understood as pure nonbodily
and transtemporal autoaffection:
A pure difference comes to divide self-presence. In this pure difference
is rooted the possibility of everything we think we can exclude from
auto-affection: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon as
it is admitted that auto-affection is the condition for self-presence, no
pure transcendental reduction is possible. But it was necessary to pass
through the transcendental reduction in order to grasp this difference in
what is closest to itwhich cannot mean grasping it in its identity, its
purity, or its origin, for it has none. We come closest to it in the move-
ment of differance.
This movement of differance is not something that happens to a tran-
scendental subject; it produces a subject. Auto-affection is not a modal-
ity of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself
(autos). It produces sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it
produces sameness as the nonidentical. (SP, 82)
Here we once again come across that concept of differance with which we are al-
ready acquainted. The context has changed, however: here differance not only
serves to explain the nonidentity of significations within the framework of a sys-
tem of signs (and, a fortiori, explaining the nonclosure of this system); rather it
now also appears as the condition of possibility for self-consciousness. Derrida
arrives at this conclusion by means of what at first sight seems to be a minimal
reinterpretation of the (Husserlian) model of reflection, which, as we saw earlier,
presupposes (and by no means denies) the distance between the two moments of
consciousness. Yet in contrast to the interpretation that Husserl himself provides
(that which reflects, affirms, and demonstrates its identity with what is reflected),
LECTURE 15 235
Derrida is of the opinion that the detour reflection takes in order to identify the
self with itself suffices to put its identity in question once and for all.
The present can only present itself as such by relating back to itself; it
can only aver itself by severing itself, only reach itself if it breaches it-
self, (com)plying with itself in the angle, along a break [brisure]
(brisure: "crack" and "joint," created by a hinge, in the work of a lock-
smith. Littr): in the release of the latch or the trigger. Presence is
never present. The possibility-or the potency of the present is but its
own limit, its inner fold, its impossibility-or its impotence. . . .
What holds for the present here also holds for "history," "form," the
form of history, etc., along with all the significations that, in the lan-
guage of metaphysics, are indissociable from the signification: "pres-
ent." (Diss, 302-3)
Indeed, once we are moving within the epistemological framework of the model
of reflection, we can no longer escape its logic. In other words, if the self origi-
nally does not know itself, but rather needs the mirror of reflection to acquire
knowledge of itself, then one can distinguish at least three temporal moments:
first, the moment of a still-unconscious innerliness; second, the moment of going
outside of itself and mirroring itself; and finally, a third moment of reinternalizing
the mirror image within the self. One cannot speak in strict terms of an instan-
taneity in the case of this event. Incidentally, we are now touching a ticklish point
in Husserl's philosophy, which argued for an internal temporality of self-
consciousness, but distinguished it strictly from the external time sequence of the
psychic ego. If it is true, however, that the self can by no means obtain conscious-
ness of itself unless it really reflects itself, then this attempted distinction breaks
down. Either there is self-consciousness, in which case several stages have to be
traversed in this coming to consciousness; or consciousness remains in its pure
presence, in which case it hasas pure instantaneity no consciousness of itself.
As we now see, even the idea of an inscription of difference into a superposed
unity is untenable within the framework of the model of reflection (that is, the
idea of a difference that exists only as difference of unity itself, as unity's own
difference). This means that self-consciousness can no longer answer for its
"unity." This unity becomes an indcidable (Diss, 219ff.). The model of reflection
presupposes, of course, that the beam consciousness aims at itself will actually
hit its target. This is not the case in Derrida's model. We recall that in the last
passage cited, he spoke of a folding of presence back upon itself, rather than of
a reflection ("[com]plying with itself in the angle"; 302). "But the fold is not a
form of reflexivity" (271). The fold bends back upon itself, without, however,
reaching itself entirely. The model of reflection, on the other hand, assumes "that
the mirror does unite the self with its image . . . deliberately and unilaterally
closes the fold, interprets it as a coincidence with self, makes opening into the
236 LECTURE 15
precondition of ^{-adequation, and reduces every way in which the fold also
marks dehiscence, dissemination, spacing, temporization, etc." (271).
At another point Derrida speaks of a barricaded street of reflection.
Following a pattern we have already experienced in the "entre" the
quasi-"meaning" of dissemination is the impossible return to the re-
joined, readjusted unity of meaning, the impeded march of any such
reflection. (268)
The metaphor implies that a criterion is missing that would guarantee the identi-
fication of the gaze directed at the mirror with the image that comes back from
the mirror to the eye. After all, nothing about the mirror itself betrays that it is
in fact a mirror. Similarly, I can only testify to the identity of the mirror image
with myself if I have access to a prereflective knowledge of myself, but that idea
does not come up at all in Derrida's reading of Husserl, although Husserl himself
considered it, especially in his later work.
3
Derrida liked to illustrate his conclusion by means of unsettling metaphors, let-
ting his own metaphors take their inspiration from the original metaphor of the
mirror as manifest in the model of reflection. What if the mirror of reflection had
no tain, he asks; what if it were to reflect back to me an uncontrollable alterity?
The truth that lifts the veil-screen . . . is already regulated according
to a mirror, and in particular a tainless mirror, or at any rate a mirror
whose tain lets "images" and "persons" through, endowing them with a
certain index of transformation and permutation. . . . But this is an
effect of the specular nature of philosophical reflection, philosophy be-
ing incapable of inscribing (comprehending) what is outside it otherwise
than through the appropriating assimilation of a negative image of it,
and dissemination is written on the backthe tainof that mir-
ror. . . . the structure of a very strange mirror. A mirror which, de-
spite the aforementioned impossibility, does indeed come to stand as a
source, like an echo that would somehow precede the origin it seems to
answerthe "real," the "originary," the "true," the "present," being con-
stituted only on the rebound from the duplication in which alone they
can arise. (314, 33, 323)
Each of these passages culminates in the same aporia: consciousness identifies it-
self by means of its mirror image; yet the mirror image has no criterion at hand
that permits such a reidentification. The mirror image could very well be the
Other of consciousness, without which, on the one hand, consciousness as such
would not exist, and, on the other hand, through whose mediation the identity of
consciousness is threatened and made into something that is "undecidable."
We will encounter this distortion of the model of reflection once again when
we discuss Derrida's theory of the sign in more detail. For the moment we are
left with the task of recognizing the operating of language in that irreducible
LECTURE 15 237
difference that is no longer the Other of itself. Based on what we already know
about Derrida, it is not hard to imagine that he will even etch the trace of meaning-
constituting difference into the alleged innerliness of self-consciousness.
Before continuing we want to describe as precisely as possible the place from
which our questions derive. We saw that Derrida's deconstructive critique of
Husserl is argued in two steps. In a first advance he unmasks the contradictions
that make Husserl's concept of a preexpressive "meaning" (intending) prob-
lematic (this area of criticism thus concerned Husserl's conception of a conscious-
ness of something)', Derrida advances to the second step of his critique when he
takes aim at the other type of consciousness that Husserl conceives, namely, at
that consciousness that is not necessarily conscious of something else, but rather
of itself (self-consciousness).
The idea of a preexpressive intending is disputed by Derrida with one argu-
ment that we already are familiar with from Saussure and (in a slightly modified
form) from Wittgenstein: in order to be able to identify something as something,
one has to distinguish it from other objects. This distinction presupposes a uni-
verse of expressions that oppose one another, i.e., a language. It is only in a lan-
guage that I can mean something (an object) with something (a word, a thought).
Husserl, however, wants to evade this conclusion. The only possibility he has
for doing so consists in the thesis that consciousness that is directed at objects in
the world can be directed at itself in a like manner, and that it achieves this by
means of a prelinguistic self-perception (Selbstanschauung). Since consciousness
is the condition of possibility for the givenness of objects (of any kind what-
soever), the totality of objects in the world would in this case depend on a preex-
pressive knowledge, namely, on the knowledge that consciousness possesses, as
self-reflection, prior to all knowledge of something. According to Derrida, this
is the strategic motivation for Husserl's recourse to the thesis of an immediate and
preexpressive consciousness that is present to itself. One could also characterize
this strategy in the following way: in order to be able to ascertain positively that
consciousness does not intermix with the sphere of exteriority at which it is
directed, one only has to be able to demonstrate that it is, first, the condition of
possibility for the knowledge of exteriority, and that it, second, does not incor-
porate in itself anything exterior. Proof for the second point is supposed to be
brought by pointing to the possibility that consciousness has for thematizing itself
prior to all knowledge about the world a possibility it possesses precisely as con-
sciousness of itself or as reflection. In reflection the innerliness of consciousness
is directed solely at itself; no trace of exteriority blurs the pure self-transparency
of this relationship.
We also saw that the first part of Husserl's program has to be viewed as a fail-
ure: facts or states of affairs acquire significance and meaning only in a language.
And even self-consciousness is not exempt from this truth, at least as long as one
238 LECTURE 15
thinks of it, as Husserl does, in terms of reflection. Reflection is the cognizant
reference of One to itself; yet precisely in this formulation it becomes obvious
that even reflection is articulated as a duality of moments, or, let us say, as a divi-
sion of One within itself. To be sure, the additional qualification that we are actu-
ally dealing with a cognizant reference is supposed subsequently to return this di-
vision to a predifferential unity of both moments. Yet if it is true-and Husserl
does not have any theoretical instruments at his disposal with which he could dis-
pute itthat the preservation of unity has this passing through a division as its
prerequisite, then unity is obviously founded in a difference, indeed, in a differ-
ence that is prior to the consciousness of unity both as real ground and as knowl-
edge ground. Especially the notion of the presence of One alongside itself des-
troys the strategic meaning of the expression "presence," inasmuch, at least, as
one is not thinking only of the simultaneity of two moments that are different from
each other, but rather of a cognizant identification that as such goes beyond the
presentness of mere Being-related-to-each-other.
Husserl deprives himself of the possibility of accomplishing a sublation of the
two moments of reflection into the knowledge of their unity because he considers
reflection to be a special case of consciousness, i.e., consciousness of something
(Other). In this case the alterity of the Other of consciousness is insurmountable;
the alleged innerliness of self-reference is fractured in order to give way to the
exteriority of an irreducible Other. And it is precisely this on which Derrida puts
his finger.
One thing should be noted here: / do not believe that self-consciousness is ade-
quately defined as a special case of intentional consciousness; rather I believe that
it is constituted as nonrelational, and thus as nonreflective, and therefore cannot
be conceived as the result of an identification. In such an instance the unity
characteristic of it could not be rescued. At the moment, however, we only have
to underline that Husserl is not aware of this alternative, and that he thus is not
able to name a criterion for the identity of the two moments related to each other
in the process of reflection. As long as this criterion is lacking, then one cannot
clearly distinguish self-reference from reference to something other (Fremdbe-
zug), and we can join Derrida in his suspicion that the metaphor of mirroring and
of the mirror image inscribed in the model of reflection resembles rather a gaze
into a mirror that has no tain, and which therefore returns to us images and
representations wewanting a criterion for comparison-can neither identify
with nor positively distinguish from ourselves. The unity of self-consciousness
with itself thus becomes an indcidable; self-consciousness appears as a special
case of a dissminai, a unityless, a decentered structure without instantaneity,
i.e., without lasting presence. We are living in a world without identical significa-
tions; and likewise our self-consciousness, of which it was our task to demon-
strate that it can grasp itself only by means of a system of significations, i.e., by
LECTURE 15 D 239
means of a language, is a fortiori affected by this fact. In this sense Derrida's state-
ment is correct.
My own presence to myself has been preceded by a language. Older
than consciousness, older than the spectator, prior to any attendance, a
sentence awaits "you": looks at you, observes you, watches over you,
and regards you from every side. (Diss, 340)
This statement, by the way, could easily have been uttered by Wittgenstein. But
the observations we have made thus far already permit us to draw a clear line that
separates Derrida's thesis of the dependence of self-consciousness on language
from that proposed by Wittgenstein (and Tugendhat). Whereas the latter two be-
lieve that the dependence of the cognizant self-reference on the system of lan-
guage usage simultaneously secures the unity and identifiability of the self (se-
cured, at least, within the limits of the range of a practical language game),
Derrida, on the other hand, believes that the linguistically dependent self-
consciousness a fortiori also participates in the equivocality of linguistic signs
whose significations, according to his view, are produced in open diacritical
references to other signs, that is, in open systems. The alterity of the reference
to the Other is insurmountable: it not only destroys temporarily, as in Hegel's di-
alectics; rather it permanently (because principally) destroys any possibility of re-
turn to a point of departure. This becomes imaginary and undeterminable pre-
cisely because there is no criterion for it.
This is exactly the point at which for Husserl the undemonstrated factual unity
of the transcendental ego is transformed into an "idea in the Kantian sense," i.e.,
into a regulative idea that I have to keep in mind if I want to be able to think of
the ego as one identical with itself, yet as one that remains "merely an idea" and
which thus cannot "constitute" the unity of this ego as a fact. Now a discipline
that needs to fall back on such regulative principles has to give up the claim of
being "exact" and must be satisfied with being called "rigorous." This is an ever-
recurring contrastive pair in Husserfs later writings, and it is simultaneously the
symptom of a crisis Derrida never tires of interpreting.
The crisis in Husserl's phenomenology is, to be sure, also a symptom of the
honesty of its author, who uncovers the limits of metaphysics, as it were, to the
detriment of his own philosophical project. It is this that constitutes the "rigor"
of phenomenology. Husserl develops this contrast primarily in his confrontation
with Dilthey's "philosophy of world view" (Weltanschauungsphilosophie). This
hermeneutical historicism can be characterized as a kind of genetic structuralism.
It reconstructs the forces and interpretations at work in the construction of a pic-
ture of the world and shows in what manner they are woven into a "ratioid" struc-
ture. I am using a favorite expression of Robert Musil's, "ratioid," and not "ration-
al," because it is a theoretical implication of radical historicism that it is not
capable of founding a rationality criterion that is independent of the factual order
240 D LECTURE 15
of a worldview. Factual data thus acquire the status of inescapable truths: they
are similar to rational truths, "ratioid," but precisely only similar to them, and
thus only similar to truth (ratiosimila or verisimilar, since every order of a world
image bears the index of its historicality and temporariness on its forehead. Thus
histoncism is transformed into a radical skepticism, since it cannot distinguish
between truths of reason and truths of fact, reducing the former to the latter.
In Husserl's eyes the structuralism of the Weltanschauungsphilosophie is
a historicism. And despite Dilthey's vehement protests, Husserl will
persist in thinking that, like all historicism, and despite its originality,
the Weltanschauungsphilosophie avoids neither relativism nor skepti-
cism. For it reduces the norm to a historical factuality, and it ends by
confusing, to speak the language of Leibniz and of the Logische Unter-
suchungen (vol. I, p. 188), the truths of fact and the truths of reason.
Pure truth or the pretension to pure truth is missed in its meaning as
soon as one attempts, as Dilthey does, to account for it from within a
determined historical totality, that is, from within a factual totality, a
finite totality. (WD, 160)
In other words, the scientific masterability of an object or a domain of objects
presupposes its closure as a totality of facts. This closure of an object would be
assured if it could be merged with structures as they are thematized both by
the natural sciences (e.g., biology) and by the structural-hermeneutical human
sciences. Phenomenology, however, cannot merge as a "rigorous science" with
such disciplines, for it is concerned with the transstructural and, so to speak,
transfinite conditions of possibility for such structures, i.e., with the validity of
the propositions made about such structures and thus with their possible truth.
Now the Idea or the project which animates and unifies every deter-
mined historical structure, every Weltanschauung, h finite: on the basis
of the structural description of a vision of the world one can account for
everything except the infinite opening to truth, that is, philosophy.
Moreover, it is always something like an opening which will frustrate
the structuralist project. What I can never understand, in a structure, is
that by means of which it is not closed. (WD, 160)
There will always be an irreconcilable difference between the comprehensibility
of the factual or the positive, and its explanation on the basis of foundations ("This
irreducible difference is due to an interminable delaying [diffrance] of the theo-
retical foundation"; WD, 161). Derrida spells diffrance with an "a," since we are
dealing not with a difference between the parts of a system or a structure but rather
with the difference that distinguishes the totality of differences in a closed struc-
ture from the openness of the thought of this structure: "it is a question of closure
or of opening" (162). Even an advance into the unity of the field that constitutes
LECTURE 15 a 241
the essences of pure consciousness can never reach the exactitude of math-
ematics.
An eidetic descriptive science, such as phenomenology, may be rigor-
ous, but it is necessarily inexactI would rather say "anexact" - due to
no failure on its part. Exactitude is always a product derived from an
operation of "idealization" and of "transition to the limit" which can
only concern an abstract moment, an abstract eidetic element (spatial-
ity, for example) of a thing materially determined as an objective body,
setting aside, precisely, the other eidetic elements of a body in general.
This is why geometry is a "materiar and "abstract" science. It follows
that a "geometry of experience," a "mathematics of phenomena" is im-
possible: this is an "attempt doomed to miscarry." This means in partic-
ular, for what concerns us here, that the essences of consciousness, and
therefore the essences of "phenomena" in general, cannot belong to a
structure or "multiplicity" of the mathematical type. Now what is it that
characterizes such a multiplicity for Husserl, and at this time? In a
word, the possibility of closure. . . . What Husserl seeks to underline
by means of this comparison between an exact and a morphological
science, and what we must retain here, is the principled, essential, and
structural impossibility of closing a structural phenomenology. It is the
infinite opening of what is experienced, which is designated at several
moments of Husserlian analysis by reference to an Idea in the Kantian
sense, that is, the irruption of the infinite into consciousness, which
permits the unification of the temporal flux of consciousness just as it
unifies the object and the world by anticipation, and despite an irreduci-
ble incompleteness. It is the strange presence of this Idea which
also permits every transition to the limit and the production of all
exactitude. (162)
This idea, however, which preserves the unity of self-consciousness despite the
flow of inner time and beyond the irreducible exteriority of reflection, has the
character of a pure postulate. It rests, therefore, on the concession that "within
consciousness in general there is an agency which does not really belong to it"
(163). This "failure" inscribed within self-consciousnessconceived as ego-log-
ical reflectioncan take on various forms. It can be a matter of the irreducible
materiality (hyl) with which the consciousness-independent reality of the given-
ness of "noemata" announces itself. It could further be a matter of the nonsimul-
taneity of consciousness with and to itself that can never be eliminated. This was
something Husserl came across when he first studied the temporality of the
"stream of consciousness," which internally undermines consciousness, and he
was barely able to escape the conclusion that an exteriority and nonpresence that
found all the operations of constitution would have to be given priority over the
innerliness and presence of consciousness. The irreducible alterity of the Other
ultimately remains entirely external to the ego-logical structure of reflection.
242 LECTURE 15
It is that the constitution of the other and of time refers phenomenology
to a zone in which its "principle of principles" (as we see it, its
metaphysical principle: the original self-evidence and presence of the
thing itself in person) is radically put into question. (164)
Husserl, as we saw, believes that he is able to assure the "principle of principles"
in the intuitive self-presence of an ego, and to derive all other knowledge from
this evidence.
I exist for myself and am continually given to myself, by experiential
evidence, as "/ myself." This is true of the transcendental ego and, cor-
respondingly, of the psychologically pure ego; it is true, moreover,
with respect to any sense of the word ego. Since the monadically con-
crete ego includes also the whole of actual and potential conscious life,
it is clear that the problem of explicating this monadic ego phenomeno-
logically (the problem of his constitution for himself) must include all
constitutional problems without exception. Consequently the phenome-
nology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a
whole. (CM, 68)
If, however, the unity of this transcendental ego, which founds the validity of all
other consciousness experiences as cognizant unity, becomes a mere postulate,
an idea in the Kantian sense, then the scientific unity of phenomenology as such
is threatened. The unity of the self and of the knowledge founded by the self opens
itself \n order to make room for the historical and temporal infinity of interpre-
tations.
Logos is nothing outside history and Being, since it is discourse, infinite
discursiveness and not an actual infinity, and since it is meaning. . . .
Since Telos is totally open, is opening itself, to say that it is the most
powerful structural a priori of historicity is not to designate it as a static
and determined value which would inform and enclose the genesis of
Being and meaning. It is the concrete possibility, the very birth of his-
tory and the meaning of becoming in general. Therefore it is structur-
ally genesis itself, as origin and as becoming. (WD, 166, 167)
This means that philosophy, inasmuch as it, as a rigorous science of facticity,
wants to escape merely historical truths and seeks to ascend to truths of reason,
must testify to the unbridgeable gap separating the factual from the counterfac-
tual. This gap also traverses in the form of nonidentity, of time flux the unity
of self-consciousness, from whose evidence and undeniable validity the certainty
and validity of all other knowledge were supposed to be derived. Now the ego,
as Husserl concedes in the Cartesian Meditations, is apodictically but by no
means adequately given (CM, 22-23). The consciousness of its "living present"
is not coextensive with the totality of the time phases in which it extends. Self-
LECTURE 15 243
consciousness, for that matter, is essentially more and quite different than "living
present": it is a projection of its future motivated by its own past. The structural
totality of Dasein (to use a Heideggerian expression) is in the "thrown projection,"
the ekstatic reaching out of past Being to its future essence. But in the living self-
present of the tripartiteness of this structure, only the "core" of the present is "ade-
quately" given. Here are Husserl's own words:
In such experience the ego is accessible to himself originaliter. But at
any particular time this experience offers only a core that is experienced
"with strict adequacy," namely the ego's living present (which the gram-
matical sense of the sentence, ego cogito, expresses); while, beyond
that, only an indeterminately general presumptive horizon extends,
comprising what is strictly non-experienced but necessarily also-meant.
To it belongs not only the ego's past, most of which is completely ob-
scure, but also his transcendental abilities and his habitual peculiarities
at the time. External perception too (though not apodictic) is an ex-
periencing of something itself, the physical thing itself: "it itself is
there." But, in being there itself, the physical thing has for the ex-
periencer an open, infinite, indeterminately general horizon, comprising
what is itself not strictly perceived a horizon (this is implicit as a
presumption) that can be opened up by possible experiences. Something
similar is true about the apodictic certainty characterizing transcendental
experience of my transcendental I-am, with the indeterminate generality
of the latter as having an open horizon. Accordingly the actual being of
the intrinsically first field of knowledge is indeed assured absolutely,
though not as yet what determines its being more particularly and is
still not itself given, but only presumed, during the living evidence of
the I-am. (CM, 22-23)
From this it follows that the transhistorical self-present of the ego, which trans-
gresses the difference of the time phases, exists only in the form of a motivated
postulate, i.e., as a regulative idea; in other words, it does not really exist. Postu-
lates demand the existence of what is postulated, but they do not affirm this exis-
tence. In the case of the stream of consciousness, the unreachability of the idea
is also compelling, for time is essentially unclosed and extends into the infinite.
As long as self-consciousness exists in time, its unity is only presumptive (as Hus-
serl says). This is a fortiori also true for all regional truths derived from the
apodictic evidence of the ego cogito, like, for example, the truths of all structural
sciences, be they a priori (as in geometry), empirical (as in biology), or historical
(as in the genetic structuralism of the philosophy of Weltanschauung).
Were we to respect and to repeat these numerous mediations once
again, we would thus be led back once more toward primordial tem-
porality. The "again and again" which hands over exactitude inscribes
the advent of mathematics within the ethico-teleological prescription of
Z44 U LfcLl UKfc, 13
the infinite task. And the latter is grounded, then, in the movement of
primordial phenomenological temporalization, in which the Living Pres-
ent of consciousness holds itself as the primordial Absolute only in an
indefinite protention, animated and unified by the Idea (in the Kantian
sense) of the total flux of lived experience. (OG, 136)
If this is the caseand the impressively aporetic reflections of The Phenomenol-
ogy of Internal Time-Consciousness have shown it to be the case then one has
to go one step further than Husserl does in the quoted formulation from the Carte-
sian Meditations. Not only past and future, not only the habits and capacities of
consciousness lie in the darkness of a horizon that cannot now be experienced;
even the present, the now of the "living self-present," slips into the darkness of
the nongiven. For only in casting itself off from its immediate past (Husserl calls
it "retention") can self-consciousness identify its presence. A present undistin-
guishable from its immediate past simply would have no past, and this would
simultaneously mean that it would not have at its disposal a criterion for the
knowledge of its own present. If, however, the differential relation to something
nonpresent precedes the consciousness of its own presence, then one can go so
far as to say that even the self-presence of the ego cogito is no absolute. For one
can only call such a being absolute that completely constitutes its Being in itself,
not having to obtain it from the reference to some other being. However, it is ex-
actly this reference that establishes for the first time the alleged absoluteness of
the living present of self-consciousness. That means that even the selfis primordi-
ally differentiated, that its cleavage (Spaltung) comes prior to its possible unity.
We will take a closer look at this idea in the next lecture.
Lecture 16
In the last few lectures we have been investigating Derrida's deconstructive
reconstruction of HusserFs theory of the subject. We know why this campaign
of neostructuralist theory has to be taken particularly seriously, for according to
the neostructuralists, modern metaphysics, in the name of the transcendental
unity of the subject, has so far successfully warded off the idea of a difference
that subsists prior to the unity of the subject.
This is also true in the instance of HusserFs phenomenology. Due to its own
internal logic, according to Derrida, it had to arrive at a modern variant of classi-
cal "transcendental idealism," and indeed, it is Husserl himself who chose this
phrase for a definitive characterization of phenomenology.
1
Thus it becomes a
part of-and I am using HusserFs own words-the "great shift" of modern
thought, the "shift to the ego cogito, as the apodictically certain and last basis for
judgment upon which all radical philosophy must be grounded" (PL, 7). If self-
consciousness becomes the "last basis for judgment," then that means that all other
judgments (for example, even those of the so-called a priori sciences like
mathematics) derive their evidence from the prior evidence of the ego cogito. Of
phenomenology Husserl claims that its
idealism is nothing other than a consistently carried through self-
disclosure, that is, in the form of a systematic egological science, of
any meaning of being which makes sense to me, the ego. (PL, 33)
The project of such a final foundation (fondement final, OG [Fr. ed.J, 151) of
knowledge in an ultimate principle can, of course, be successful only if this prin-
246 LECTURE 16
ciple is evident in and of itself. That is what the term "evident" means. Yet it is
precisely this evidence that is obscured in Husserl's phenomenology due to the
fact that, first of all, it conceives "self-consciousness" as reflection (as the mirror
image of the One in itself, i.e., as a case of self-knowledge which passes through
two different moments);
2
and, second, because it views this self-consciousness
as being undermined by the flux of internal time consciousness. To be sure, Hus-
serl emphasizes "that all of existence with its fluctuations, its Heraclitean flux-
is one universal synthetic unity" {PL, 18). If this were not the case, then the ego
would not be capable of simultaneously knowing its unity; i.e., it would not be
capable of "being for itself what it actually is" (cf. 18). In fact, however, it be-
comes clear that Husserl has major difficulties in citing the criterion that would
allow one to speak of the ekstases of self-consciousness that are extended over
different time phases as unities. It would have to be a pretemporal unity, and yet
one that would remain stable over the course of time, a unity that at the same
time and this is the most essential pointcan be known (if it were to transcend
knowledge, it could not simultaneously bring about the synthesis of self-
consciousness; i.e., the self would be a unity not conscious of itself, and this
thought is contradictory and goes against all experience). We remember that Hus-
serl attempted to solve the problem with an aporetical construction: he talks about
the unity of the self as if it were an "idea in the Kantian sense." And it is exactly
at this point that Derrida's deconstructive critique takes hold.
Something that is merely postulated is not. What is, is the reference of One
to itselfhowever, this reference lacks any criterion to ensure the identity of the
two moments, and thus it remains without any certainty about their sameness.
Reflection does not lead with total certainty back to its point of departure: thus
the circle of self-identification is ruptured, and the evidence of the ego cogito, as
the ultimate basis for the judgment of all truths, becomes obscure.
It is mainly in the nonidentity inscribed within internal time that Derrida finds
grounds for the impossibility of a knowing self-identification. Husserl himself
had conceded that "the living self-present" of the ego is swamped by a host of non-
present things that are not given, and that these undermine the "adequacy" of its
self-givenness. Derrida goes one step further and claims that even the self is not
given to itself, because the present in which it could coincide with itself is itself
not present to itself.
As we have seen, the Living Present is the phenomenological absolute
out of which I cannot go because it is that in which, toward which, and
starting from which every going out is effected. The Living Present has
the irreducible originality of a Now, the ground of a Here, only if it re-
tains (in order to be distinguishable from it) the past Now as such, i.e.,
as the past present of an absolute origin, instead of purely and simply
succeeding it in an objective time. But this retention will not be possible
without a protention which is its very form: first, because it retains a
LECTURE 16 247
Now which was itself an original project, itself retaining another pro-
ject, and so on; next, because the retention is always the essential modi-
fication of a Now always in suspense, always tending toward a next
Now. The Absolute of the Living Present, then, is only the indefinite
Maintenance [the NownessJ of this double enveloping. But this Main-
tenance itself appears as such, it is the Living Present, and it has the
phenomenological sense of a consciousness only if the unity of this
movement is given as indefinite and if its sense of indeflniteness is an-
nounced in the Present (i.e., if the openness of the infinite future is, as
such, a possibility experienced [vcue] as sense and right. . . . The
unity of infinity, the condition for that temporalization, must then be
thought, since it is announced without appearing and without being con-
tained in a Present. This thought unity, which makes the phenomenali-
zation of time as such possible, is therefore always the Idea in the Kan-
tian sense which never phenomenalizes itself. (OG, 136-37)
This is a complex and, it seems to me, very clear characterization of an essential
problem that Husserl was not able to eliminate in his lectures and notes in The
Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness .
3
I would like to examine this problem a bit more closely. While he was studying
the phenomenon of time, Husserl made a discovery that was obviously quite dis-
concerting for him and his project of phenomenology : the supposed Archimedean
point of the world-constituting consciousness is actually undermined by an even
more fundamental entity. This is what, following William James, is called the
"stream of consciousness." The flux of internal time divides the identity of con-
sciousness without there being "something" that might be able to be altered and
that might flow, for the flow of time is "absolute subjectivity" itself (T-C, 100).
What phenomenology earlier calledignoring the internal flux of timean "act,"
or "intentional experience," now, on closer investigation, reveals itself to be by
no means instantaneous; rather it has been produced in a flux (T-C, 101). The as-
serted absoluteness of the flux as subjectthus consists in the fact that every
individual temporal occurrence "is reduced to such a flux" (150) after the
phenomenological reduction. Everything that is temporal is hence in flux, except
for this flux itself. In this sense, i.e., as pure form of change and duration, flux
can justifiably be called "absolute."
4
But doubts arise as soon as one accepts this conclusion: in order to be not
merely absolute, but absolute subjectivity, the flux of time must have knowledge
of itself. But of what sort could this knowledge be?
The consciousness in which all this is reduced, I cannot myself again
perceive, however. For this new perceived entity would again be some-
thing temporal which referred back to a constitutive consciousness of
just such a kind, and so on, ad infinitum. The question arises, there-
fore, whence can I have knowledge of the constitutive flux? (150)
248 U LECTURE 16
This problem arises because, as we have frequently seen, Husserl thinks of sub-
jectivity in terms of the model of reflection: an intentional experience (or even
the egoity which carries all experiences) folds back upon itself and becomes its
own intentional object. Only if one conceives self-consciousness in this way can
the dilemma of infinite regress conjured up by Husserl arise. It consists, to be
more precise, in the fact that every intentional act has a certain duration (thus it
is in temporality), but that this, however, is not supposed to be the case for the
absolute flux of time itself: it is not in temporality, and thus it has no duration.
Now if there is only consciousness of something as intention (and that means in
temporality), then it follows from this that a flux of time conceived as self-
thematization either cannot be absolute or cannot be intended. If it is absolute,
then it does not endure, and it thereby overreaches the possibilities of an inten-
tional act; if it can be thematized intentionally, then it is finite (i.e., it is of only
a certain limited duration) and thus nonabsolute.
Husserl emphasizes that "there is no doubt that such perception [of the flux of
time as such, beyond all duration] exists" (152). If this is the case, however, then
the contradiction must be inherent to the theoretical instruments that account for
the phenomenon. That means that the model of consciousness of something (i.e.,
intentionality) appears not to be applicable to the self-consciousness of the abso-
lute flux.
Husserl, nevertheless, holds fast to his analogy between consciousness of
something and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a special case of con-
sciousness: it is a consciousness that, instead of being directed at something other,
is directed at itself, and it functions in such a way that two moments-let's refer
to them in abbreviated fashion as subject and objectcan always be distin-
guished. A consciousness into which a relation (i.e., an internal contrast) were
inlaid could, of course, no longer be called absolute. Husserl therefore has to be
careful to think of the absolute self-consciousness of the time flux in a manner
different from how he conceives an intention directed at itself (i.e., as reflection).
If the flux were the object of an intention that thematizes it, then it would only
have the "temporal extension," i.e., "the duration" of this intention itself (152):
it would be produced by it and would vanish with it, and thus it would be finite
and relative.
This difficulty with the conception of consciousness in his phenomenology
forces Husserl into a curious position: on the one hand, he cannot postulate a sim-
ply monoform (einsteiliges) self-consciousness (for then intentionality, which as
a beam of consciousness is always directed at something that itself transcends
consciousness, would be dependent on something that itself is not intentional in
itself, and it therefore would not be primal). On the other hand, he also cannot
concede in this particular case that consciousness of the absolute time flux is the
LECTURE 16 D 249
resuit of a self-reflection of the flux, for then this flux would always only have
the "duration" of the beam of intentionality that happens to thematize it.
Caught between the Scylla of a monoform consciousness of time flux and the
Charybdis of a bipolar-reflective consciousness of time flux, Husserl considers
in some groping formulations a model of consciousness that in a mysterious man-
ner would take a middle position between these two: he sometimes calls it an "in-
ternal," or "non-posited consciousness" (T-C, 175), at other times an "implicit in-
tending" (178), a prereflective attending of the "pre-empirical being of the lived
experiences" (178), or a "non-objectifying act of meaning" (178).
All these expressions have in common (and that is their function) that they seek
to bring into view a certain possibility of self-perception that, on the one hand,
would be distinct from the intentional and positional reference to an object (in this
sense it can be called prereflective); on the other hand, however, Husserl cannot
imagine that there could be a consciousness in which the poles of subject and ob-
ject simply coincide, for all consciousness is consciousness of something that
transcends it. A consciousness deprived of this transcendent something as its tar-
get would automatically cease to be consciousness.
Retention is just such an immediate intending; it is a consciousness that, at ev-
ery moment, I have of the most temporally recent phase of the internal influx into
my consciousness. Indeed, I can clearly distinguish this consciousness from
memory or from "reproduction." Memory explicitly and, as it were, objectify-
ingly thematizes a past act experience. This is not the case for retention: in the
consciousness of the present it preserves an immediately prior consciousness
without reflectively objectifying it.
With this Husserl believes he has found an explanation for the consciousness
of time flux as such. According to this hypothesis, the absolute subjectivity of the
flux would constitute itself neither in the instantaneity of a timeless, nonrelational
familiarity nor in an explicit intention, but rather, as it were, by means of an infec-
tious contact between retentions, so that at any given time that retention nearest
the present would communicate its temporality (Zeitlichsein) to the present one,
and so on ad infinitum.
Since each phase is retentionally cognizant of the preceding one, it en-
closes in itself, in a chain of mediate intentions, the entire series of
retentions which have expired. The unities of duration which are
reproduced through the vertical lines of the diagram of time and which
are the Objects of the retrospective acts are constituted precisely in this
way. In these acts the series of constitutive phases together with the
constituted unity (e.g., the enduring sound, retentionally preserved un-
altered) attains givenness. It is thanks to retention, therefore, that con-
sciousness can be made an Object. (T-C, 162)
250 D LECTURE 16
The underlying idea is clear: in each consciousness of the present the conscious-
ness of the preceding phase is prereflectively preserved, and the same applies for
this phase in relation to the preceding one, etc. Thus the consciousness of the flux
as a whole arises within the framework of an unclosed and continuing movement,
the end of which can only be death.
There is a major problem, however, in this attempt at an explanation, and Hus-
serl was aware of it. It can be explained in the following manner: if consciousness
of the flux occurred during the transition from consciousness of the present to
retentional consciousness, then there could only ever be time consciousness as
consciousness of the immediate past. This is obviously not the case; on the con-
trary, we also have consciousness of our present and do not have to "wait," figura-
tively speaking, until "primal consciousness" has become retention. If this were
the case, then we would never be able to judge that any retention is the most im-
mediately past one, since we would need the oppositional concept of the present
in order to make such a judgment. Husserl, however, obviously believes that con-
sciousness of this present subsists only when it becomes the object of a thematiza-
tion, which, although not reflective, is yet bipolar, by means of the "primal con-
sciousness."
If one were actually to draw this conclusion, then one would lose the possibil-
ity of being able to found the evidence of the ego cogito in the living self-present,
for precisely this present as a consciousness would be threatened. Since such a
conclusion would be devastating for the legitimation of a transcendental phe-
nomenology as "primal science," Husserl has to lay claim to a fact for whose ex-
planation the theoretical means at his disposal are clearly insufficient: an instant
self-consciousness of the now, that is, a consciousness of itself without any re-
course to the bipolar model of reflection. Indeed, Husserl finds himself forced to
move in this very direction.
We can now raise the question: What about the beginning phase of a
self-constitutive lived experience? Does it also attain givenness only on
the basis of retention and should we be "unconscious" of it if no reten-
tion followed thereon? On this it can be said that the beginning phase
can become an Object only after its running-off in the way indicated,
through retention and reflection (or reproduction). But were we aware
of it only through retention, what its designation as "now" bestowed on
it would be incomprehensible. The beginning phase could at most only
be negatively distinguished from its modifications as that phase which
does not make us retentionally conscious of any preceding ones. But
consciously it is, of course, positively characterized throughout. It is
certainly an absurdity to speak of a content of which we are "uncon-
scious," one of which we are conscious only later. Consciousness is
necessarily consciousness in each of its phases. Just as the retentional
phase was conscious of the preceding one without making it an object,
LECTURE 16 251
so also are we conscious of the primal datum namely, in the specific
form of the "now" without its being objective. It is precisely this con-
sciousness that goes over into a retentional modification, which then is
retention of this consciousness itself and the datum we are cognizant of
originarily in it, since both are inseparably one. Were this conscious-
ness not present, no retention would be thinkable, since retention of a
content of which we are not conscious is impossible. (T-C, 162-63)
This passage once again bears witness to Husserl's self-critical faithfulness to
phenomena. Here he encounters a phenomenon whose solution overtaxes the the-
oretical apparatus of his theory of knowledge. Husserl must now accept what he
calls "primal consciousness" as a sort of immanent act of revelation in which
something that is prior to constituted temporality (and therefore eternal) is medi-
ated to temporal consciousness in every instant, without itself being capable of
becoming the theme of a beam of intention directed at it. This would be the oppo-
site of a consciousness of something and to this extent it would be monoform (ein-
stellig). If it were not to exist, then retention would have nothing that it might
retain, for one can preserve in immediate memory only something that was previ-
ously conscious in its present. But it is precisely the monoformity {Einstelligkeit)
of primal consciousness that is absolutely unthinkable (for Husserl): he demands
it, without eludicating the particular structure of the consciousness in which it is
manifest. The fact that he essentially conceives prereflective consciousness as a
relation that is analogous to reflection makes itself obvious in the comparison he
makes.
Just as the retentional phase was conscious of the preceding one
without making it an object, so also are we conscious of the primal
datum . . . without its being objective. (162)
Here a parallel is drawn between the reference of a retention to the preceding one
and the instantaneous self-consciousness of the primal datum. Now it is easy to
distinguish two elements in the relation of a retention to its preceding one: the
first and the second retention. The matter is quite different, however, in the case
of the primal datum; if one wants to preserve the strict instantaneity of conscious-
ness, then one cannot tolerate here that there be two consciousnesses, one
thematizing the other. Husserl apparently is reassured by the addendum that con-
sciousness does not in either case objectify its object, and he emphasizes this fre-
quently in the appendixes to his lectures on internal time consciousness-.
One may by no means misinterpret this primal consciousness, this pri-
mal apprehension, or whatever he wishes to call it, as an apprehending
act. Apart from the fact that it would be an obviously false description
of the state of affairs, one would also in this way get involved in insolu-
ble difficulties. If one says that every content attains consciousness only
252 LECTURE 16
through an act of apprehension directed thereon, then the question im-
mediately arises as to the consciousness in which we are aware of this
act, which itself is still a content. Thus the infinite regress is unavoida-
ble. However, if every "content" necessarily and in itself is "uncon-
scious" then the question of an additional dator conscious becomes
senseless. (163)
Here Husserl conjures up the classical difficulty of every reflective theory of self-
consciousness. If consciousness of consciousness would have to be conceived in
analogy to the consciousness of something, then only that which in the given in-
stance was just thematized (let's call it the object pole) would be illuminated. In
order to make conscious that which thematizes (let's call it the subject pole), a
new reflection, whose subject position would again remain unconscious, would
be necessary, and so on ad infinitum. Self-consciousness, however, does exist,
and therefore the theory of reflection must be incorrect or inappropriate to it. In
the ninth appendix to his lectures, Husserl goes as far as to affirm this conclusion,
but he never goes as far as to reject the model of the reflectivity of consciousness.
Obviously, he presupposes something like a noetic or virtual duality of the primal
consciousness that would then be the condition for (worldly, or actual) reflection.
"Even if reflection is not carried out ad infinitum and if, in general, no reflection
is necessary, still that which makes this reflection possible and, in principle (or
so it seems, at least) possible ad infinitum must be given" (154). But how should
reflection be made possible if what makes it possible does not already carry the
predisposition for a future division or duplication in itself?
Every act is consciousness of something, but every act is also that of
which we are conscious. Every lived experience is "sensed," is imma-
nently "perceived" (internal consciousness) although naturally it is not
posited or meant ("to perceive" here does not mean intentionally to be
directed toward and to apprehend). Every act can be reproduced; to ev-
ery "internal" consciousness of the act as an act of perception belongs a
possible reproductive consciousness, for example, a possible recollec-
tion. To be sure, this seems to lead to an infinite regress; for is not the
internal consciousness, the perception of the act (of judgment, of exter-
nal perception, of rejoicing, etc.) now again an act, and hence itself in-
ternally perceived, and so on? On the other hand, we can say: every
"lived experience" is in the significant sense internally perceived. But
internal perception is, in the same sense, not a "lived experience." It is
not itself again internally perceived. (7-C, 175)
Here the question is whether the nonpositing consciousness is analogous to the
positing consciousness, i.e., to that consciousness that thematizes its object. And
the answer is yes and no. Yes, because Husserl considers it, first, to be the condi-
tion of possibility for reflective retropresencing {Ruckvergegenwartigung) (and
LECTURE 16 253
to this extent it must itself carry the trace of an internal duplication); and, second,
because he takes it to be an internal "perceiving," but a "perceiving" nonetheless
(perceiving, however, is always a perceiving 0/something). No, because Husserl
understands very well that the infinite regress could not be stopped if nonpositing
self-consciousness were a case of intention. He therefore chooses this formula-
tion: "Behind this act of perception there stands no other such act, as if this flux
were itself a unity in a flux" (176).
However, if we were to lend credence to this last observation, then all traces
that allow us to think of the relation between primal consciousness and its im-
mediate presencing as a matter of "internal reflection" (178) would have to be con-
sistently eradicated. Nevertheless, Husserl expresses "internal consciousness"
i.e., each nonpositing self-consciousness of an act of meaning of something that
is laid into a "positing act of meaning"by means of a formula in which two ele-
ments stand side by side, i.e., as "Pi(A)." In this formula A stands for "any act
known in internal consciousness (which has been constituted in it)," whereas P\
means "the internal consciousness" of A (176). According to this, the complex
phenomenon of self-consciousness could be described in this way: there is the in-
tentional act (e.g., looking forward to something, seeing something, thinking of
something, etc.), and this act represents a unity, surrounded by the flow of reten-
tions and protentions, within the flux of time. An internal perceiving that itself,
however, is not an act, but rather a nonpositing familiarity of the act with itself,
has been inscribed in this intentional act so that it does not have to wait for its
retention in order to become conscious. In short, there are two poles in conscious-
ness: the act, and the consciousness of the act. Precisely here lies the permanent
difficulty in Husserl's theory of time consciousness: it is forced to articulate the
asserted unity of the phenomenon by means of a duality of moments.
5
A con-
sciousness or self-consciousness that is articulated in itself carries in itself the
germ of a diffrance that makes the unity phenomenologically demonstrated to
be in it into an idea in the Kantian senseand exactly this, as we saw, is Derrida's
objection.
Unfortunately, Derrida has not specifically interpreted the quoted passages
from Husserfs Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, although he fre-
quently relies on the problematics of time consciousness as the focus of his decon-
struction: "Husserl's reflections on primordial temporality touch on the most pro-
found region of phenomenological reflection, where darkness risks being no
longer the provision of appearing or the field which offers itself to phenomenal
light, but the forever nocturnal source of the light itself (OG, 137).
This formulation betrays what Derrida finds fascinating about the aporias in
which HusserFs philosophy of time goes astray: it is the problem of "final institu-
tion" (Endstiftung), of a "final grounding" {Letztbegrundung) of phenomenology.
It is not as if Husserl fails to supply answers to these aporias; as a matter of fact,
254 U LECTURE 16
he emphatically refers to the "transcendental ego" as if it were the supreme evi-
dence from which all other recognitions (Erkenntnisse) that lay claim to being
"knowledge" (Wissen) or "science" (Wissenschaft) derive their validity. Yet the
ego itself, however, is standing on unstable ground: it is thrown into time and it
cannot once more confer upon itself the real ground of its factual subsistence. It
constitutes itself under the presupposition of a ground that escapes it itself. In
other words, the light of evidence in which it dwells is not its own work; an in-
superable passivity is prior to its own activity. Derrida speaks of a retreat of the
principle and adds that it is this retreat of the principle that first permits
phenomena to appear ("without this disappearing of the ground necessary for ap-
pearing itself; OG, 138). An unilluminable nonevidence is the real ground for
the evidences of consciousness, i.e., of transcendental phenomenology. Now the
evidence of phenomena, their being clear in and of themselves, is precisely what
Husserl calls his "principle of principles." If one maintains that this principle in
reality is not a principle, but rather something that itself is a product of principles,
the principle of a fondement-en-retrait, then one refers the unity of the meaning
of Being to something that is transcendent to consciousness: this unity becomes,
as we know, a merely regulative idea in the Kantian sense, "indefinitely deferred
[diffre] in its content but always evident in its regulative value" (OG, 138).
It is not by chance that there is no phenomenology of the Idea. The lat-
ter cannot be given in person, nor determined in an evidence, for it is
only the possibility of evidence and the openness of "seeing" itself; it is
only determinability as the horizon for every intuition in general, the in-
visible milieu of seeing analogous to the diaphaneity of the Aristotelian
Diaphanous, an elemental third, but the one source of the seen and the
visible. . . . If there is nothing to say about the Idea itself, it is be-
cause the Idea is that starting from which something in general can be
said. Its own particular presence, then, cannot depend on a phenomeno-
logical type of evidence. . . . This space is the interval between the
Idea of infinity in its formal and finite (yet concrete) evidence and the
infinity itself of which there is the Idea. It is on the basis of this
horizon-certainty that the historicity of sense and the development of
Reason are set free. . . . The Endstiftung of phenomenology
(phenomenology's ultimate critical legitimation: i.e., what its sense,
value, and right tell us about it), then, never directly measures up to a
phenomenology. (OG, 138-39, 140, 141)
In short, the transcendental condition of possibility for evidence is as such not evi-
dent, it is not given in itself; the unity of the transcendental ego escapes itself,
it does not possess itself. With this, however, the possibility of deriving the unity
of the meaning of the world from the unity of the "living self-present" is obscured.
For precisely this unity is a mere, if motivated, demand; the unity of the living
present "is present only in being deferred-delayed [diffrant] without respite, this
LECTURE 16 D 255
impotence and this impossibility are given in a primordial and pure consciousness
of Difference. . . . Difference would be transcendental" (153).
We need to take a closer look at the remarkable formulation at the end of this
quotation. "Difference would be transcendental": this is obviously a difficult for-
mulation. It resembles, in a certain sense, Wittgenstein's use of the word "tran-
scendental," as, for example, when he writes in the Tractatus that ethics is tran-
scendental (cf. 7V, 6.421 ).
6
As we know, the younger Wittgenstein defines the
totality of what can be meaningfully said as the set of possible syntheses between
"elementary propositions" (propositions in which experiences are described) and
logical judgments. What he calls "logical form" mediates between the two. The
logical form is the condition of possibility for any meaningful use of language,
but one cannot speak meaningfully about this condition itself. Wittgenstein ex-
presses this in a general way in the assertion that logical form establishes the
limits of my world (of the totality of valid statements). "The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world" (7>, 5.6). "Logic fills the world: the limits of the
world are also its limits" (7>, 5.61). This nonreflectivity that Wittgenstein be-
lieves inscribed in logic prevents one from making statements about the world,
i.e., about its logical form; for in order to accomplish this I would have to trans-
gress the limits of language. Yet precisely this is the intention of all transcendental
philosophy, which would like to construct the limits of the world from a trans-
mundane position, for example, from the perspective of the subject. Wittgenstein
remarks that such a transcendental subject does not belong to the world; it is,
rather, a limit of the world (7r, 5.632), and is therefore something unexpressible:
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field
of sight. But you do not really see the eye.
And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is
seen from an eye. (7r, 5.633)
We do not want to get bogged down in the difficulties of reading the Tractatus;
rather we only take note of this one point of convergence in Wittgenstein's and
Derrida's use of the word "transcendental." Both deny-to be sure, with very
different consequences-the possibility of escaping language with the purpose of
deriving and mastering its regularities from a point beyond language. Wittgen-
stein disputes that one can speak about the limits of language, since one is impris-
oned inside these limits; and Derrida disputes that differentiality can be sur-
mounted by appealing to a transcendental subject. That which is the condition of
possibility for meaning and consciousness, and which has until now been called
"transcendental," is Diffrence itself. This is the sense in which the intentionally
paradoxical phrase "Difference would be transcendental" is valid.
256 D LECTURE 16
The pure and interminable disquietude of thought striving to "reduce"
Difference by going beyond factual infinity toward the infinity of its
sense and value, i.e., while maintaining Differencethat disquietude
would be transcendental. And Thought's pure certainty would be tran-
scendental, since it can look forward to the already announced Telos
only by advancing on (or being in advance of [en avanant sur) the
Origin that indefinitely reserves itself. Such a certainty never had to
learn that Thought would always be to come. (OG, 153)
This should not be understood as a sort of continuation of transcendental philoso-
phy by other means: it is both the preservation (Aufliebung) and the overthrow
of transcendental philosophy simultaneously. To be sure, the term "transcenden-
tal" means "condition of possibility for the recognition of something." Whereas,
however, the classical idealist concept of the transcendental designates a place of
evidence, i.e., something that is not only the condition of possibility for knowl-
edge, but rather itself'also conscious and, therefore, the subject of knowledge,
the expression "transcendentality of difference" means something itself not con-
scious that would be the condition of possibility for consciousness and for
knowledge.
In Of Grammatology Derrida designated as "ultratranscendental" this differ-
ence that makes the classical transcendental subject (e.g., of the Kantian critique)
possible, and he returns to this conception once more in Limited Inc. Here he calls
the diffrance that is neither present nor absent the condition of possibility for on-
totheological (i.e., metaphysical) discourse, at the same time claiming that it es-
capes this discourse.
The rest of the trace, its remains [restance] are neither present nor ab-
sent. They escape the jurisdiction of all ontotheological discourse even
if they render the latter at times possible. (LI, 225)
What distinguishes this diffrance that makes discourse possible from a transcen-
dental principle is its internal rupture, its lack of origin or root, its nonidentity
with itself.
No constituted logic nor any rule of a logical order can, therefore, pro-
vide a decision or impose its norms upon these prelogical possibilities
of logic. Such possibilities are not "logically" primary or secondary
with regard to other possibilities, nor logically primary or secondary
with regard to logic itself. They are (topologically?) alien to it, but not
as its principle, condition of possibility, or "radical" foundation; for the
structure of iterability divides and guts such radicality. (235)
We have to bracket off the term "iterability" in the present context, since at the
moment we cannot take cognizance of its implications. For the present I will only
say this much: the iterability of concepts or signs can no longer be guaranteed
LECTURE 16 D 257
if the criterion for their identity is destroyed simultaneously with the identity of
a transcendental subject evident in itself. We can, as a precaution, replace "itera-
bility" with differance, and then Derrida's caveat states that we can no longer say
of diffrance that it is "a transcendental condition of possibility evoking . . .
other phenomena . . . into conditioned effects . . . this kind of (classical)
logic is fractured in its code by iterability." (244)
Let's pause here for a moment. In a broad sweep we have analyzed remaining
mostly in the vicinity of Derrida's introduction to Edmund HusserVs Origin of
Geometryihc difficulties that Husserl (as the last significant representative of a
transcendental-philosophical type of philosophy) encountered in his attempt to
defend the ego cogito as the "principle of principles," i.e., as the supreme evi-
dence and principle from which all other evident "act-experiences" could be der-
ived. Derrida managed to demonstrate that there is a fracture that runs through
the heart of self-consciousness, a fracture that places its suitability as the principle
of a transcendental philosophy in dispute. But that is not all: Derrida, trying to
outdo Husserl, attempts to conceive this difference as the "ultra-transcendental"
condition of possibility for self-consciousness (i.e., for transcendentality). That
means that transcendentality does not simply resign, but rather that it reflects its
posteriority over against something other, with whose relationship with the
differential play of language we are already familiar, and which in this context
is simply called diffrence.
What I have just described has sometimes been depicted as Derrida's intention
to deny the possibility of transcendental philosophy. I believe, however, that such
a thesis simply comes up short. In contrast to the early (and, in a certain sense,
even the later) Wittgenstein, Derrida does not repudiate the phenomenon of self-
consciousness that is evident in itself; to do this would indeed mean falling into
absurdity. What Derrida has in mind, if I am correct here, is to provide a differ-
ent, a more illuminating explanation of that same phenomenon that is taken into
consideration only within the framework of transcendental philosophy at the price
of indissoluble aporias. This, at least, is something he says very clearly in his in-
terview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta entitled "Positions." To
be sure, he does not explicitly speak about the subject here, but rather about the
referent and about meaning; but we know meanwhile to what extent these con-
cepts are tied together in Derrida's thinking: logocentric metaphysics would like
to found the effects of meaning attribution and reference presemiologically in a
subject that is present to itself, without having to pass through the "parade of sig-
nifies," i.e., diffrance. Therefore, what Derrida says about these other two
"idealities" is a fortiori true for the subject as well.
In effect, we must avoid having the indispensable critique of a certain
naive relationship to the signified or the referent, to sense or meaning,
remain fixed in a suspension, that is, a pure and simple suppression, of
258 U LECTURE 16
meaning or reference. I believe that I have taken precautions on this
matter in the propositions that I have advanced. But it is true, and the
proofs are not lacking, that this is never sufficient. What we need is to
determine otherwise, according to a differential system, the effects of
ideality, of signification, of meaning, and of reference. (P, 66)
Let me briefly summarize the essence of this statement. Derrida says that one has
to avoid the impression that the work of deconstruct ion is simply a suppression
("suppression pure and simple") of the phenomena that are to be explained. Such
a reductionism, as it commonly occurs in the early phase of logical positivism
(e.g., in Carnap), has nothing in common with Derrida's deconstruction of meta-
physics. It is not the denial of these phenomena that is necessary; what is neces-
sary is a different, a better, and that means a more plausible explanation than the
explanation that was possible within the context of transcendental philosophy.
Now we at least know the direction in which Derrida's demand is moving: that
self-consciousness that is called transcendental should not be the explanatory
ground {ratio cognoscendi) of difference; rather, the latter should be the explana-
tory ground of self-consciousness. Self-Being and meaning are no longer in-
stituters of differential relations; rather they themselves are results of the differ-
ence that precedes them, and which, as our reading of Husserl taught us, cannot
be interpreted as a relation of reflection (in a relation of reflection it is always a
matter of the difference of two elements that come together in a third; f\ 58-61),
which dialectically transforms the temporality of their opposition into identity.
Unfortunately, Derrida never demonstrated concretely what this positive continu-
ation of the thus far purely negative deconstructive work would look like. He has
produced no work that, profuse in its detail and based on a thoroughgoing knowl-
edge of modern theories of self-consciousness, unmasks self-consciousness as the
effect of differential relations. I find that very unfortunate, for among neostruc-
turalist thinkers, Derrida is hardest on the heels of this phenomenon, and he un-
doubtedly commands sufficient knowledge of the history of philosophy to ap-
proach the issue. It might seem to some that I am distorting matters somewhat
by overemphasizing in my lectures the problematics of the subject, and one might
claim that, in reality, this problem never concerned neostructuralism. I do not
think that such a suspicion has any foundation. The entire early work of Derrida,
and basically even everything that he has written since, constantly refers to be
sure, negatively-to the problematics of self-consciousness. One could say that
Derrida is more interested in a refutation of the principle that makes subjectivity
the point of departure for deductive conclusions than he is in the refutation of any
other Western, i.e., metaphysical, principle. And in this Hegel and Husserl
are-ex negativoDerrida's constant dialogic partners. Let's not forget that, if
one considers the work published by Derrida thus far, the quantitatively greatest
portion of his texts is devoted to Husserl and Hegel, the thinkers who uphold self-
LECTURE 16 259
consciousness as a self-evident principle.
7
His position first took shape, or, at
least, first convincingly developed, on the basis of his critique of these two philos-
ophers. However, I believe thatin contrast to Lacan, with whom we will deal
later-Derrida has yet to make his alternative explanation of the phenomenon of
subjectivity compelling; indeed, he has not even been able to present it in an out-
line. However, we can easily imagine the difficulties he would have had with it,
and which now hang over his work as omissions, as blanks, as indications of
thoughts he neglected to think. I would like to try to outline some of them here.
First of all, Derridawith a destructive purpose in mind, to be suretakes
over, from among the positions he criticizes, the view that in the instance of self-
consciousness we are dealing with something like aprsence--soi, i.e., a rela-
tion of reflection. In a previous lecture we saw that he shares this view, among
others, with Heidegger. For both of them this conception has a strategic function.
If it is a matter of founding the hypothesis that the history of the West consists
in the successive unfolding of a primordial interpretation of Being as presence
(ousia, prsence), then, of course, a self-consciousness conceived as presence to
itself (Anwesenheitbeisich) (e.g., inFichte, Hegel, and Husserl) was particularly
welcome, for one could demonstrate on its example the will to delusion, i.e., the
repression of Being. The zenith of this repression of Being, understood as "pres-
ence of the present," in Western metaphysics was attained, according to this in-
terpretation, in Fichte's and Hegel's philosophies of a self-consciousness that au-
tonomously posits itself and its object, sublating it into its innerliness; and the
crisis that follows upon this (supposedly first comprehended by Nietzsche) would
then be the motive of return, of recollection, a crisis whose most recent and most
impressive phase begins with, and as, neostructuralism.
This scenario, you will justifiably interject, is too simple to be true, and, in-
deed, I consider it to be simply false, first of all, because precisely romantic ideal-
ist theory no longer took self-consciousness to be a principle, but rather con-
ceived it as something principled (als ein Prinzipiat), i.e., as the agency (Instanz)
in which the self declares its independence of what Schelling calls the "un-
prethinking Being." In contrast to a still widespread clich, idealism laid the
ground for the "turn" in the Western interpretation of Being that Heidegger and
his successors then carried out; and idealism accomplished this in part with con-
siderably more profound, better elaborated, and more fitting arguments than
those of the later philosophers.
And second, the foregoing scenario is false because it is not correct to say that
idealism consistently conceived of self-consciousness as "presence to itself (An-
wesenheit bei sick). On the contrary, we have Fichte and the early romantic phil-
osophers to thank for their clear insight into the impossibility of thinking of the
familiarity that consciousness has with itself as a relation ofreflection. To be sure,
the elaboration of this insight produced new difficulties, which, however, are of
a quality of which we have no inkling in Derrida's work. Hegel was the only one
260 U LECTURE 16
among the idealists who held on to the theory of reflection in describing self-
consciousness: he characterizes it as the coming to itself of a relation, i.e., of a
One that was previously already self-relation. Thus he "saw to it that all of
Hegelianism would remain dogmatic and unproductive with regard to the theory
of consciousness."
8
This is still true for nonidealist Hegel critics, for example,
for Heidegger and Derrida. We saw earlier that the apparent "founding" of reflec-
tion in the ekstatic structure of understanding and care only repeats this structure
of reflection.
For Derrida, who simply remained a negative Hegelian because of his fixation
on the model of reflection as the absolute pudendum, this reproach applies
in an only slightly modified form. If he does not want simply to deny self-
consciousness and meaning, as the passage cited earlier certifies, but only "ex-
plain it differently," namely, as a secondary effect of a prior difference, then he
encounters difficulties that are in part analogous to those that were uncovered by
Hegel's critics (above all by Schelling), and which are in part even more
problematic. Schelling addressed to Hegel the question of how it could be possi-
ble for the absolute spirit to recognize itself as itself at the end of its path leading
to self-knowledge, if it had not already had some knowledge of itself: nothing
would be able to recognize itself as itself if it did not have a criterion for its identi-
fication in the form of a preceding (and self-familiar) knowledge. Hegel's theory
of the mind is thus erected on the basis of a theoretical circle, a petitio principii.
But the circularity of his argumentation nevertheless lays claim to some-
thingin the form of a presupposition or an assumptionthat in itself is not so
absurd: the unity of our view of the world. Derrida, it seems to me, lets go of
this presupposition and is then confronted with the problem of having to derive
self-consciousness from pure difference. Now it may very well be that one has
to describe the "structurality of structure" as a centerless play of differences. Still,
the mere reference between two marks could never in all eternity produce their
sameness, and it certainly could never lead to a consciousness of this sameness.
Nothing about a "mark," which stands over against another "mark," betrays that
they are the same. Now Derrida, indeed, does not seem to assume this, since he
excludes not only identifiability, but also in particular cognizant identification
within the structural field. In this case, however, there would be nothing in the
self that might change and become familiar as something changed. But a pure
change cannot be conceived of; lacking a criterion, it would be indistinguishable
from pure nonchange. If everything is in flux, then the flux itself can also no
longer be recognized; i.e., any statement to the effect that it is so would necessar-
ily nullify itself. This is not true in Hegel, who, presupposing a unity, rescues
the "self-consummating skepticism" from total dissolution by interpreting this dis-
solution as suhlation, i.e., as the disputing itself of pure difference in the face of
the unity of negation inscribed in it, whose autonomy supports the whole structure
(Gebude).
LECTURE 16 261
Thus Derrida's attack on the dialectical unity of self-consciousness seems to
me to miss its target. Even in a radical theory of "indistinguishability" one would
still have to be able to demonstrate what significance can be attributed to the ex-
pression "identity" in language games. A theory that disputes the applicability of
this term no longer interprets the world in which we live and communicate with
language. Even temporary (and permanently new and differently articulated)
"unities" are unities, and even if they were appearance or illusion, we could de-
mand of philosophy that it make the genesis of this illusion intelligible. To merely
point out that behind this illusion of self-identity, and, what is more, of cognizant
self-identity, there stands pure difference, cannot explain the phenomenon, and
it unconsciously strengthens the force of the attacked positions from Fichte,
through Hegel, to Husserland this even after one admits that they have suffered
under the blows of Derrida's critique.
Lecture 17
We followed Derrida's deconstructive reading of Husserl up to the point at which
he draws something like a conclusion. This conclusion he formulates very point-
edly: "Difference would be transcendental" (OG, 153). Derrida later substituted
his neologism "diffrence" for this Diffrence written with a capital letter. Diffr-
ance refers not to a subsisting difference but, to put it poignantly, to that genera-
tive gap that can never be sublated (in a Hegelian manner) into a unity in which
all determinations (Bestimmtheiteri) spring up and then dissolve once again.
Determination and this is a leitmotif of neostructuralism is the effect of
differential relations between marques of a structure. However, since the
differentiality of structure provides no center, the play of differential determina-
tion^) is open, and this means that every signification of a term or of an expres-
sion that is marked off by a certain context can interminably be altered by a new
differentiation in new contexts. Formulated in this way, diffrance seems to be
the ground both of the unity (determination) and of the nonidentity (displacement)
of the signification of terms.
This formulation is nearly identical to the one with which Hegel, and Schelling
in his intermediary period, designate the principle of their philosophy: the Abso-
lute, they maintained, is not simply the coincidence of something manifold in the
One, and also not the unityless manifold itself in its opposition to unity, but rather
the "unity of unity and opposition." This formulation, which on first sight seems
to be unnecessarily complicated (involuted, in the literal sense of this word),
states that in the instance of absolute spirit we are not dealing with a unity that
imprints its unity onto the manifold of given experience from outside (as is the
IfT)
LfcL.1 UKfc 1/ U ZOJ
case with transcendental self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason);
rather it states that the Absolute is both unity and the manifold. According to
Schelling, each moment in the self-constitution of the spirit, the positing (unified)
as well as the posited (different) "is the whole Absolute" (SW, 1/6, 164); the "dou-
bling of the essence [of the Absolute] represents, in this instance, not a diminu-
tion, but an augmentation of unity" (SW, 1/7, 425). Each moment of self-relation
knows itself by means of the act itself through which it is present to itself as "a
part of the whole," and even as "the whole indivisible [Absolute] . . . itself
(SW, 1/6, 165). Not only is this sameness the case, it is, in addition, conscious
in the Absolute: both what affirms as well as what is affirmed in the absolute spirit
know themselves as the same; they stand in the light of an identity that yet over-
arches their opposition. In 1804 Schelling expressed this in the following way:
not only is that which affirms the same as that which is affirmed, but "the essence
of all things [is] the affirming and the affirmed of itself (SW, 1/6, 148; italicized
in the original). This "of itself means that what is posited in the difference be-
tween the two moments of self-relation is actually not their opposition, but rather
the absolute unity of these moments.
By means of this self-affirmation nothing affirming and nothing affirmed
as such, nothing subjective and nothing objective, is posited; rather
only God is posited as the same who affirms and is affirmed; the affirm-
ing and the affirmed themselves, however, are not posited. (SW, 1/6,
164)
This is a classical formulation typical of idealism in its heyday: unity is posited
into the opposition, but it is not posited as opposition. All forms of relation can
thus be traced back to forms of self-relation; and self-relation is nonrelative to
that extent that its moments are the affirming and the affirmed of themselves, i.e.,
of the Absolute.
Derrida senses himself to be very close to this concept of a unity of moments
that yet is different in itself. In his 1968 lecture to the Socit franaise de
philosophie ("La Diffrance"), he himself emphasized this problematical prox-
imity to Hegel.
Writing "diffrant" or "diffrance" (with an a) would have had the ad-
vantage of making it possible to translate Hegel at that particular
pointwhich is also an absolutely decisive point in his discourse
without further notes or specifications. And the translation would be, as
it always must be, a transformation of one language by another. I con-
tend, of course, that the word diffrance can also serve other purposes:
first, because it marks not only the activity of "originary" difference,
but also the temporizing detour of deferral; and above all because
diffrance thus written, although maintaining relations of profound
affinity with Hegelian discourse (such as it must be read), is also, up to
264 D LECTURE 17
a certain point, unable to break with that discourse (which has no kind
of meaning or chance); but it can operate a kind of infinitesimal and
radical displacement of it, whose space I attempt to delineate elsewhere
but of which it would be difficult to speak briefly here. (Margins, 14)
Thus there are, according to Derrida, profound relationships between diffrance
(with an a) and Hegelian difference. Both types of difference are, in a certain (if
not in the same) sense, authors of differential relations.
Hegel says as much at the end of the Introduction, when, following the
same procedure as in all his systematic expositions, he presents the
sketch of internal division, of self-differentiation as self-determination
and self-production of the concept. It is the moment at which the Ein-
leitung (introduction) becomes Einteilung (division). (Glas, 13)
We saw earlier that it would be very unjust to assert that German idealism -
allegedly the culmination of the Western repression of Beingoverlooked the
fact that determination is grounded in contraposition, and thus in negation.
Fichte, we recall, spoke of the "law of reflection of all our knowledge." This law
states that nothing can be recognized as that which it is, without our also thinking
that which it is not. Even the idea of the principle, of the Absolute, is not excepted
from this necessity of having to distinguish itself through contrast with the non-
Absolute; in other words, it must transform itself into a relation in order not only
to be absolute, but to be as the Absolute. Hegel's entire dialectic rests on the un-
folding of this basic insight and can be understood as an attempt to reconcile the
idea of grounding unity with the idea of difference (without which there would
be no determination).
In order to bring out more clearly than Derrida himself does what he calls the
"profound affinity" between Hegel's dialectic and the notion of diffrance, I want
to summarize Hegel's basic idea in coarsely simplified fashion. Hegel believed
that he could derive unity and difference from a single conceptual structure.
Unity, or the Universal, is that which only has reference to itself. In contradistinc-
tion to this, the particular is that which has its Being in something else or which
refers to something else. We note that both definitions, that of the universal as
well as that of the particular, employ the category of reference. In the first case
it is a matter of the reference of One only to itself; in the second case the referen-
tial relation mediates between elements that are different from each other. But the
reference as such, Hegel says, is the same in both cases. In the first example the
reference is the "immediate," for what does not refer to something other than it-
self, but rather like "Being" in the Logic- -"refers only to itself," can justifiably
be called immediate. In the second case we are dealing with something mediated,
with mediation: one element refers to another, and the reference between the two
establishes a bond or a commensurability between the different elements.
LECTURE 17 Cl 265
If, in addition to this, both references are to be developed out of the unity of
one single thought, then one would have to show that the reference to something
other is in truth a self-reference. And that is precisely the strategy Hegel's Logic
employs, following a most meticulously structured argument. His intent is to ex-
pose the monoform (einstellige) relation that is at work in the instance of im-
mediacy as identical to the two-part reference that constitutes the differential rela-
tion. That means that he sought to prove the unity of immediacy and mediation,
or the unity of unity and difference.
Recent Hegel criticism has characterized this as "Hegel's basic operation."
1
It
consists in drawing conclusions from the idea that negation can be considered to
be a self-sufficient principle of philosophy. In this case we would be dealing with
a negation that would be entirely independent, i.e., a negation that would not first
and foremost be the negation of something, as in propositional logic, nor would
it be a question of a negation executed by a subject that is prior to this negation.
Henrich calls this an "autonomous negation."
2
This independence both from an
object pregiven to it, as well as from a subject that executes it, is derived from
the capacity of such a negation to apply itself to itself, i.e., to become self-
referential (a negation of negation). In this self-referential duplication, negation
is not related to something other than itself (something that would be independent
of it), but rather to itself and only to itself. On the other hand, in the case of self-
application, negation is still not without an object, i.e., without something other
than itself (even if this other is negation itself). One can draw a third conclusion
from the thought that negation has become autonomous: self-referential negation
has a result that is different from itself, namely, the affirmation or the position
that is the result of a negation of negation. We thus can distinguish three elements
in the structural totality of autonomous negation: first, nonreferential (or mono-
form) negation; second, self-referential (or doubled, two-part) negation; and
third, pure affirmation or position as a result of the self-application of negation.
We can add to this the observation that the first and third elements are compatible
to the extent that no relation takes place in these instances: in the first example
it has not yet taken place, and in the third it no longer takes place; both these types
of negation, therefore, can be called "simple" or "immediate.'
1
The difference is
that the first is the instance of a completely undetermined and presuppositionless
immediacy, whereas the third is a determined (i.e., in itself differentiated) and
resultant immediacy. Thus for Hegel the difference between the absence of a
presupposition and the supposition of a result becomes "the source of an imma-
nent logical progress" with whose unfolding the Science of Logic is concerned.
The notion of an autonomy (in the sense of self-sufficiency) of negation allows
for a circumstance-and we must not forget this in which negation has no object
that is different from itself. For the same reason it must be conceived as self-
referential, since all negation is negation of something.
266 LECTURE 17
In the classical double negation, the first negation negates a statement
[thus something different from the negation], and the second negation
negates the first. In this case the duplication of negation by no means
implies self-reference in the strict sense, but rather only an application
of second-degree negation to first-degree negation. For Hegel's autono-
mous negation, however, it is the case that it has to be duplicated pre-
cisely because it is in this way that it can be made self-referential. This,
however, leads to the conclusion that the two negations cannot be dis-
tinguished from one another by the fact that they belong to two different
degrees. We rather have to conclude that they are not at all different
from each other. Negation that negates negation negates itself. By the
same token, however, we need to add that negation can negate itself
only when it can establish a relation with itself of such a sort that we
can distinguish it from itself, to the extent that we can distinguish be-
tween it as something that is negated and it as something that negates.
In autonomous negation, negation is self-negating and is negated by it-
self. Otherwise one would not be able to identify at all what it means to
say that negation is duplicated. The consciousness of the fundamental
meaning, but also of the logical problematics of all forms of self-
reference, is characteristic of post-Kantian idealism. In Hegel's develop-
ment of autonomous negation this problematics first begins to appear.
3
In fact, Hegel's Logic approaches its goal in three steps: from Being, to essence,
to concept. If all three stages are to be understood as forms of autonomous nega-
tion, then one should be able to reformulate each one of them in terms of negation:
Being would then be negation in the state of immediacy, a relation "only to itself,"
as Hegel says, i.e., not to anything other. Essence would be negation in the state
of mediation, as a negation that is differentiated in itself and in which what negates
encounters what is negated as if it were its Other. In this instance, negation is both
immediacy and mediacy at the same time. But it is also more than this: as the rela-
tion of something negative to itself, it produces as a result the canceling out of
itself of negation and the opening of a space that one could cautiously designate
as the absence of negation or, in Hegel's words, as pure immediacy or as concept.
If we analyze the expression "absence of negation," we realize that the term "nega-
tion" is used a third time here; what is actually said is that "the autonomous, the
double negation does 'not' exist. Thus negation occurs here three times. In its third
occurrence it functions [in the] meaning . . . [of the] Not of difference between
irreconcilable states."
4
One might be tempted to believe that with this, negation
is simply canceled. In truth, however, the phrase "the autonomous negation does
not exist" is itself relational: it relates simple negation to self-negation, and only
by virtue of this negative reference does negation sublate itself as negation. Thus
"the thought of the relation to the Other [must be] taken up into the thought of
LECTURE 17 267
pure self-relation."
5
Otherness appears here as a consequence of the "Not" that
distinguishes the two referential elements from each other.
The conclusion that this position has to be a result based on the thought of au-
tonomous negation can also be drawn from the observation that negation is in fact
called "autonomous" only because it is not preceded by anything foreign and au-
tonomous. In the classical case of propositional logic the negation of the negation
of a statement is its position. In Hegel, however, there is no statement that pre-
cedes and is independent of negation, and which would be reinstated in its positiv-
ity if negation were to cancel itself out. Accordingly, on the basis of Hegel's
premises, positivity, if h occurs, can be accounted for only as result (not as
presupposition) of the double negation, and it is a result that cannot be supplanted
by the thought of the self-negating negation (it is its result, not its object). If this
is the case, then self-referential negation must always be conceived as relation to
its opposite (to a state of nonnegativity). In other words, autonomous negation
is the reference to an Other-not to an independent or prior Other, but rather to
a resultant Other.
6
To be able to guarantee that this reference, which was just formulated as an
opposition, is simultaneously a .^//-relation, one has to demonstrate the sameness
of the related moments. That which faces negation as its opposite has to be in its
essence the same as negation itself. The opposite of autonomous negation, there-
fore, must also be able to be conceived as autonomous negation; otherwise nega-
tion would indeed be heteronomous, i.e., it would have its Being in something
Other. Only when the Other proves itself to be identical with autonomous nega-
tion (i.e., proves itself to be autonomous negation) has its autonomy been cor-
roborated.
The full description of its self-relation, therefore, has to be as follows:
at the inception there is negation. Then it negates itself. With this, how-
ever, it falls away and thus, in its self-reference, which is negative, it is
related to its opposite. This relation to an Other can, in a strict sense,
be restricted to a self-reference only if the Other is once more negation
itself. That means, however, that the opposite of autonomous double
negation must itself be a double negation. Double negation can be con-
ceived as self-relation only if it is thought twice. In Hegel's language
this would sound something like this: the Absolute is only with itself in
its Otherness.
7
Let me repeat this concisely formulated summary in my own words. Before arriv-
ing at the third step, whose understanding presents us with the greatest difficul-
ties, we already saw that the internal structure of autonomous negation includes
two modes of Being of negation: negation as mere self-reference (immediacy);
and negation as the explicit reference of something that negates to something
negated (mediation). However, both these modes of Being do not form an opposi-
268 LECTURE 17
tion with each other, since they can be thought of as two aspects of one and the
same "negative self-relation." In other words, mcdiacy in duplicated negation (ne-
gation that is referred to negation) can be conceived as articulation of that relation
that negation has with itself in the state of monoformity (Einstelligkeit). Now,
however, at the third level at which the logic of autonomous negation unfolds,
we are dealing with the relation of a state of negation to a state of absence, i.e.,
with the relation of negation to an Other that is really different from it (to some-
thing that itself is not negation). This Other is not - as in Schelling or Hlderlin-
to be accounted for as a heteronomous presupposition of negation, but rather as
its result. Nevertheless, the question arises as to how negation might be able to
grasp its opposite as a new and different expression of itself. For this to occur,
Hegel answers (in his chapter entitled "Determining Reflection"),
8
it is necessary
that one not only identify, as has been the case up to this point, negation with it-
self; rather the entire relation of negation to its Other has to be identified with
itself in a further duplication of its structure. In other words, a state in which ne-
gation falls away by virtue of self-application (let's call it, following Hegel,
"intro-Reflection" [Reflexion-in-sich]) is supposed to be identical with another
state in which negation is related to the Other of itself (and is therefore not "intro-
Reflection," but "reflection upon the Other of itself). This could occur only if the
first state were the faithful mirror image of the second, and, moreover, if it were
to reveal itself ay the last state's mirror image (otherwise the essence would indeed
see /Vsaf/undistortedface to face, as it were-but not as itself)- Reflection would
have to "duplicate" itself in all its previously derived aspects.
It is, first, that which is presupposed, or that intro-Reflection which is
the immediate; and, secondly, it is Reflection which, as negative, refers
itself to itself; it refers itself to itself as to that other which is its not-
being. (Logic, II, 29)
The first synthesis would then be its reflected double in the form of the In-itself
(An-sich) (immediacy), whereas the second synthesis would mirror and negate
the same relation in the form of the For-itself (Fur-sich) (mediation). This
reduplication seems to incorporate an authentic dialectical relation insofar as each
related moment contains the entire relation (Hegel calls it "infinite self-relation";
Logic, II, 34) to exactly the same extent as, on the other hand, they only are what
they are as related moments of this "entire" or "infinite relation" that transcends
them. In other words, what is posited as something immediate, independent of
reflection, would prove to be itself reflection. With this it undermines by its own
action its independence of the Other of the opposing reflection and turns of its own
accord into the other related moment; and for this second moment one could
demonstrate the operation of the same mechanism. By means of such an exchange
of roles, the thought of an autonomous, twice-duplicated negation is indeed
confirmed as ^/^-determination: in its second aspect autonomous negation posits,
LECTURE 17 269
negates, and determines itself as the presupposition it is in its first aspect. This
seems to make Hegel's project complete: everything happens as if the Being-for-
itself of the entire relation were posited. Negative reflection is thoroughly autono-
mous: in its duplication it consciously has only to do with itself; its determination
is transparent to it. The "taking back" into its self-relation of its reference to the
Other confirms its "reflection-determinateness" as "the relation to its other-being
in itself (Logic, II, 34). Put differently, the Absolute is only with itself in its
Otherness, and sameness of the Absolute exists only as the immanent sublation
of its Otherness.
At this point we want to pause and formulate two questions. The first is, Can
Derrida's idea of diffrance really differentiate itself from Hegel's idea of autono-
mous negation? The second question is, Do both basic operations, "autonomous
negation" on the one hand, and "autonomous play of differences" on the other,
really make what we understand under "self-consciousness" and "meaning" com-
prehensible?
The first of the two questions is a complex one, and it is further complicated
by the fact that, first of all, Hegel himself nowhere elaborated on this basic opera-
tion as such (Dieter Henrich's text is a summary of the procedure as applied in
the section on reflection in Hegel's Logic), and, second, that Derrida nowhere
deals in a systematic way with Hegel's Logic (what he says about Hegel in his
most voluminous study primarily traces Hegel's material theses and refers, above
all, to the Berlin Philosophy of Right). These two difficulties, however, do not
undermine the legitimacy of our question itself; we would basically be capable
of answering it even without Derrida's help.
We must first of all recall that Derrida unfortunately, without giving further
evidence in support of thisconcedes that there is a deep affinity between Hegel's
dialectic and his own diffrance (those "relations of profound affinity with
Hegelian discourse"; Margins, 14). The thought of diffrance cannot simply
break with Hegel, "but it can operate a kind of infinitesimal and radical displace-
ment of it, whose space I attempt to delineate elsewhere but of which it would
be difficult to speak briefly here" (14). It is too bad that Derrida does not name
that place he refers to where he responds to our first question; it is more likely
that there is no place at which he systematically responded to this. The dialogue
with Hegel remains an ou topos, a Utopia of neostructuralism.
Let us, therefore, give an answer on our own. What is remarkable at first is
that both diffrance and autonomous negation are purely formal. I understand
"formal" in the same sense as the editors of Saussure's Cours, where one can read
that language is not a substance but a pure form. And indeed, if Hegel's negation
were supported by something substantial, then it would no longer be autonomous;
it would then rather be founded on a substratum that, as such, could not be nega-
270 LECTURE 17
tive. A One that exists only in relation to an Other could only be thought as heter-
onomous, not as autonomous.
This also applies by analogy to Derrida's diffrance. In his lecture to the
Socit Franaise de philosophie, Derrida explicitly refers in the discussion of
diffrance not only to Hegel but also to Saussure: "In a language, in the system
of language, there are only differences" {Margins, 11). That means that diffr-
ance, thus written, does not "play" (joue) within a relational system of already
given facts (or positivities); rather, as it were, it determines or produces the posi-
tions of these facts in the first place.
What is written as diffrance, then, will be the playing movement that
"produces"by means of something that is not simply an activitythese
differences, these effects of difference. (Margins, 11)
If the meaning-producing movement of diffrance (of differentiation, diffrencia-
tion; Margins, 13) determines the places of possible positivities, it is not also a
positivity itself: it should be considered neither as a subject nor as a substance
nor as something present nor even as a something at all. In this sense it can be
called "autonomous" like Hegel's negation. This, to be sure, has an implication
Derrida does not express in this way, one that we, however, need to supply here:
diffrance makes relations possible, and it cannot exist without an open field of
relations between givens; yet it itself does not participate in the play of these rela-
tions (otherwise it would be something, and not the condition of possibility), and
in this sense it has to be taken to be absolutely singular and relationless, like
Hegel's negation. In other words, diffrance, although it is the condition of possi-
bility for the play of differentiations, is itself, however, still distinguished from
this play: it does not exist without this play, but it is not the play itself; and it does
not exist due to this play (in the first case it would be a relation, in the second,
an effect; both would stand in contradiction to its transcategorical autonomy).
It is because of diffrance that the movement of signification is possible
only if each so-called "present" element, each element appearing on the
scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby
keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting
itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this
trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is
called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of
this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a
past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the
present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this
interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide
the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the pres-
ent, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our
LECTURE 17 271
metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the
subject. (Margins, 13)
In Hegel's or Henrich's terminology, this could be formulated something like this:
singular and absolutely relationless negation realizes itself as a relation, and in
this relation it has to do with the Other as though only with itself. Since, however,
this relation must be conceived as autonomous, the Other of negation can only
be itself again in a different aspect, and therefore it is negatively related to its sin-
gularity and relationlessness. In other words, since we are dealing with a negative
relation of negation to itself, its simplicity and relationlessness are disputed as
such: its originary self-presence is denied it. Precisely this is also the case with
Derrida's diffrance: it realizes itself in the form of differences-or it produces
them("Differences, thus, are 'produced'-deferred-by diffrance"; Margins,
14). But having become a self-referential phenomenon, it simultaneously disputes
the illusion of its own alleged unrelatedness. From this point on, it will never find
the way back to itself as something that is identical with itself: it is "deferred"
without the possibility of finding its way back to pure immediacy. But it is pre-
cisely this possibility that Hegel admits of in the instance of his autonomous nega-
tion by duplicating the process of negative duplication once more and as such in
a third step: the self-negation of the second step produces a result, namely, the
absence of negation. And this state reduplicates itself in its Other, in such a way
that this Other now can be grasped as the Other of itself, i.e., as its mirror image
and pure positivity.
Derrida supported his reference to Hegel by means of a passage from Hegel's
Jena Logic as translated by Alexandre Koyr. Here Hegel speaks of a "different
relation" (diffrente Beziehung) in the thought of the present. The present, Hegel
writes,
"is of an absolutely negative simplicity, which absolutely excludes from
itself all multiplicity, and, by virtue of this, is absolutely determined; it
is not whole or a quantum which would be extended in itself (and)
which, in itself, also would have an undetermined moment, a diversity
which, as indifferent (gleichgilltig) or exterior in itself, would be related
to an other (aufein anderes bezge), but in this is a relation absolutely
different from the simple (sondern es ist absolut diffrente Beziehung)"
(Margins, 13-14)
Derrida proposes to translate diffrente Beziehung, not as Koyr does, as "differ-
ent Relation," but rather as "differentiating Relation," thus lending it an active
sense (Margins, 14); and this translation accords with the question, with which
we now are familiar, as to whether there is really a difference between this
differentiating relation in Hegel and Derrida's diffrance.
Unfortunately, the essay "La Diffrance" does not enlighten us any further in
this regard. All the negative predicates Derrida applies to the term la
272 U LECTURE 17
diffrancethat it is not a subject, not a substance, nothing present, no cause, no
agent, and no essence, but also no linguistic system, etc. all of this is just as true,
in the final analysis, for Hegel's autonomous negation as well. And Hegel's
diffrente Beziehung even shares with diffrance the fact that all categories of the
intelligible world can be derived from it. To be sure, Derrida does not intend to
work up a transformation of Hegel's Logic, he does, however, state that the
phenomena of "meaning" and "consciousness" are determinations or effects of a
system: not one of originary presence, however, but one of diffrance {Margins,
16). Hegel could thus correspondingly say that concepts like Being, indifference,
essence, reflection, existence, identity, ground, concept, idea, etc., are effects or
determinations of different stages in the self-unfolding of the play of autonomous
negation: they are, in other words, simply "concepts," and not transconceptual
entities.
In spite of the almost aporetical confession of a deep affinity between diffr-
ance and absolute negation, Derrida continued to maintain that Hegel himself was
a representative of metaphysics, i.e., that he remained caught up in the traditional
philosophical grammar that in the end definitively gathers together the unlimited
play of differences in the thought of an absolute self-present. Yet Derrida knew
quite well that Hegel's variant of metaphysics does not take a principal presence
or positivity as its point of departure, but rather that it leads up to it. In Glas, for
example, he writes:
The being-near-itself of the mind is actively produced through a limit-
less negativity. The mind becomes for-itself, near-itself, only by ac-
tively denying everything that limits its freedom from the outside. Its
essence is active, dynamic negative. (31-32)
In this passage I presume that Derrida recognizes that negation in Hegel's work
has the nature of a principle or of autonomy. He also elaborates quite clearly the
difference between a mere being-related and a negative being-related.
A return to itself, of the mind, consciousness is the simple and immedi-
ate contrary of itself. It is that of which it is conscious, that is, its op-
posite. At once active and passive, identifying itself with its own oppo-
site, it separates itself from itself as its object. . . .
Theoretical consciousness thus has the form of a contradiction, the
form of a relation that is related to something that is not related, does
not relate (itself) {Widerspruch einer Beziehung aufein absolut nicht
Bezogenes), which absolves itself of the relation. (135, 137)
With the condition that autonomous negation in its full unfolding must be con-
ceived as a reflective relation but as a negative one a virtual duality of mo-
ments is always preserved. Hegel's intention is to demonstrate that these moments
will prove to be One and the Same, but they are not One and the Same by nature
LECTURE 17 D 273
and from the very beginning (their terminal identity is supposed to be a result).
Yet when "identity differs, as identity" (Glas, 189), i.e., when identity itself has
to be conceived as a negative reflective relation that is, as a contradiction in
itself-then the following difficulty arises: either the second moment of the self-
relation falls away, in which case identity no longer has a specular tain for reflec-
tion and can gain no consciousness of itself; or the Other of identity participates
in the play, in which case we are dealing with a difference that, even if both mo-
ments really had the same content, would not yet necessarily also produce a con-
sciousness of this identity. (These are the circular implications of the model of
reflection with which we are already familiar, and which will resurface when we
set about answering our second question.)
Derrida seems, at least, to be aware of the difficulties that arise when one tries
to overcome the state of negative relation with the goal of working toward either
a grounding or a final unity, something Hegel, in fact, attempts to accomplish.
Those who have read the left column in Glas, which is devoted to Hegel, know
that Derrida retranslates the difficulty Hegel had with the idea of absolute recon-
ciliation into the terminology of the philosophy of religion. This puts Derrida's
reading of Hegel into close proximity with that of Schelling. Hegel had assumed
that although in religion the absolute identity of religion with its opposite was
"conceived" (vorgestellt), it was not yet "comprehended" (begrifferi). Derrida thus
concludes that if absolute identitydue to the fact that it cannot eradicate the trace
of nonidentity or of differencein fact cannot be adequately comprehended
(begrifferi), then that religion that holds on to difference receives ex post facto a
kind of legitimation as a speculatively insuperable position.
The reconciliation between being and the same, between the being itself
of being and the being the same of being is produced, to be sure, in re-
vealed religion, but comes forth there as an object for consciousness
that has this representation, that has it before it. The reconciliation is
produced and yet it does not yet take place, it is not present, but only
represented or present as remaining before, preceded, to come, present
as not-yet-there and not as a presence of the present. . . .
Consciousness represents unity to itself but it is not there. It is be-
cause of this, for that matter, that it has the structure of a consciousness
[which for Derrida means simultaneously: of a re-flection], and the
phenomenology of mind, the science of the experience of conscious-
ness, finds its necessary limit in this representation.
Absolute religion thus still retains negativity; it remains in a state of
conflict, scission, worry. . . .
And if one considers that philosophyabsolute Knowledge- is the
myth of absolute reappropriation, of presence to oneself absolutely ab-
solved and recentered, then the absolute of revealed religion would
have a critical effect on absolute Knowledge. One would have to keep
274 LECTURE 17
to the (opposite) shore, that of religion . . ., in order to resist the lure
of absolute Knowledge, A combinatory hypothesis. {Glas, 246-48)
Let me attempt here to summarize the answer to our first question, namely, can
Derrida's thought of diffrance actually be distinguished from Hegel's (or Hen-
rich's) idea of autonomous negation? Both Derrida and Hegel conceive of a pure
negation that, in a second step, becomes self-referential, but which from that
point onward has to be thought of as relation (as divided identity). Hegel tries
to think of it as a reflective relation, as self-recognition in the Other. Derrida
holds fast to the idea that the trace of nonidentity or of differentiality can also not
be eradicated in the formula of reflection (which he accepts as such).
9
In the ter-
minology of Hegel's "Doctrine of Essence," one can say that Derrida comes to
a halt at that which Hegel calls "difference" and does not proceed onward to that
self-sublation that takes place in "contradiction." In the absolute contradiction, ac-
cording to Hegel's famous words, difference (in the aspect of opposition) is elimi-
nated, it "falls to the ground" (zu Grunde gehen); i.e., it gives way to the category
of the "ground."
10
Unfortunately, Derrida has not interpreted this chapter in "The
Doctrine of Essence." He has, however, repeatedly alluded to it, as for example
in Glas, where he paraphrases Hegel's statement with the following words:
This opposition, like opposition in general, will have been at once the
manifestation of difference (and consequently of this remainder of time
where the void of signification steps aside) and the process of its efface-
ment or of its reappropriation. As soon as difference is determined, it is
determined in opposition, it is manifested, to be sure, but its manifesta-
tion is at the same time (it is the time of the same as effacement of the
remainder of time in the itself [Selbst]) a reduction of difference, of the
remainder, of the step aside. It is the thesis. (Glas, 263)
A further allusion can be found in La Dissmination, banished to a footnote.
The movement by which Hegel determines difference as contradiction
("Der Unterschied iiberhaupt ist schon der Widerspruch an sich" The
Science of Logic II, chap. 2) is designed precisely to make possible the
ultimate (onto-theo-teleo-logical) sublation [la relve] of difference.
Differancewhich is thus by no means dialectical contradiction in this
Hegelian sensemarks the critical limit of the idealizing powers of re-
lief [la relve] wherever they are able, directly or indirectly, to operate.
Differance inscribes contradiction, or rather, since it remains irreduci-
bly differentiating and disseminating, contradictions'. In marking the
"productive" (in the sense of general economy and in accordance with
the loss of presence) and differentiating movement, the economic "con-
cept" of differance does not reduce all contradictions to the homogeneity
of a single model. It is the opposite that is likely to happen when Hegel
makes difference into a moment within general contradiction. The latter
LECTURE 17 U 275
is always ontotheological in its foundation. As is the reduction of the
complex general economy of difference to difference. (Belated residual
note for a postface.) (Diss, 6-7)
This footnote is an interesting piece of evidence, even if it presents itself as purely
thetic and makes no effort to prove a point. It is too bad that so many important
observations in Derrida's work have the character of such notes rsiduelles et at-
tardes, which, although he systematically applies them in appropriate contexts,
are basically not supported on the basis of arguments. In any case, we can take
as one difference between Hegel and Derrida (among many others, of course) the
fact that the latter does not believe that the moments that dispute each other in
"contradiction" "bring each other to the ground" (richten sich zugrunde) in order
to become transparent for the pure unity of the ground; rather, Derrida holds on
to the thought of an infinite chain of negations which are not sublated in any finite
term because their signification is "being other than . . ."and not the contradic-
tory opposition.
A second question remains that, in philological terms, is even more difficult
to answer than the first. But if we want to find out whether "autonomous negation"
or "autonomous difference" can really make intelligible what we understand as
"self-consciousness," then we must put this question not simply to Hegel or Der-
rida but also to ourselves: we want to know about this, and we therefore do not
necessarily need to support our observations on the basis of texts.
This is the place to elaborate on a doubt that has accompanied our lectures for
quite some time now. I first want to direct it to Hegel, although it applies in mo-
dified form just as well to Derrida and, as we will see, to Lacan also. Let me first
phrase my doubt in the form of a question: does the successful proof of the iden-
tity between the elements of the relation already guarantee that we are dealing
with a cognizant self-relation? In other words, does self-identification imply con-
sciousness of the identity of the identified related elements?
This question is directed at the underlying model used to explain self-
consciousness, namely, at the model of reflection. To be sure, Derrida rejects this
model, the prsence--soi. Nevertheless, he knows of no other one, and this
means that he too remains negatively connected to the model of reflection as the
only possibility of thinking of self-consciousness.
Translated literally, the word reflection means "remirroring" {Widerspie-
gelung). If autonomous negation duplicates itself in a final step and faces itself
in the totality of its structure, then one can justifiably say that it mirrors itself in
itself. Hegel expresses this with the term "intro-Reflection" (an expression Sartre
translates as le jeu reflet-refltant). But something that mirrors itself in itself by
no means has to have consciousness of the sameness of the two related elements.
A tree that mirrors itself in a calm forest lake certainly constitutes a case of reflec-
tion without any knowledge of the sameness of what is mirrored and what is mir-
276 U LECTURE 17
roring; even in the case of the famous myth of Narcissus one can doubt whether
Narcissus knows that it is he whose image smiles lovingly up at him from the wa-
ter. For nothing about the image betrays that it is the same as the original. Such
a consciousness of identity falls outside of the play between reflected and reflect-
ing: if it occurs, it would be the result of a consciousness that is not one with the
reflection. For reflection articulates an insuperable duality, whereas identification
unifies. In order to be able to identify the two moments of reflection themselves
during the play of their division, one would have to have a criterion that tran-
scends the limits of the model of reflection. If we apply this to the twice-
duplicated negation in Hegelto what in the "Doctrine of Essence" he calls "posit-
ing reflection"we can say that, although for him the identity of negation and its
Other (the absence of negation) is derived, this is not true for reflection itself. But
only a reflection that simultaneously implies consciousness of the identity of its
related elements would be a case of a cognizant self-reflection.
It was Schelling who first systematically raised this objection to Hegel's at-
tempt at sublating allegedly heteronomous "Being" into the autonomous play of
"reflection." As I have shown elsewhere in considerable detail, Schelling claimed
that Hegel's attempt at founding self-consciousness as the result of a reflection
does not have at its disposal any criterion for the knowledge (Gewusstsein) of the
identity of the related elements; rather it simply presupposes this identity. Being,
conceived as relation only to itself, but nevertheless as relation, is identified with
another form of relation (that of reflection), whereby this second relation reveals
itself to be the mere unfolding of the self-relation that was implicitly presupposed
in Being. According to Schelling, however, this argumentative step is not only
circular; it does not even prove what Hegel wants to prove, namely, that the iden-
tity of Being and essence, of identity and difference, can be known.
Let me try to give a highly compact abstract of Schilling's second criticism.
The reduction of identical Being to reflection (conceived as duplication of self-
relating negation) is, according to Schelling, not only circular; on top of this it
believes incorrectly-that the characteristic feature of the self constitutes itself
in the play of two reflexes. In fact, as Schelling already taught in 1804 (that is,
several years before the appearance of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind), the syn-
thesis of self-knowledge cannot be grasped as the real ground for our knowledge
of the I: neither of the related elements, nor even the concept of relation-as-a-
whole, exhibits the trait of being the same as their Other, or the same as that which
is grasped by them. This doubt persists regardless of whether one concedes that
consciousness of the self only exists in the unity of the same thought in which the
relation also carries on its play. As we know, that was Hegel's view, and Schelling
does not dispute it. What he claims is simply that two negations related to one
another (or the self-relation of negation) are the necessary, but not the sufficient
condition for founding the existential experience of the cogito sum. Although two
reflexes that negate each other may very well be able to deny each other's autono-
LECTURE 17 277
mous and independent Being, they are capable of instituting neither the con-
sciousness of the sameness of the related elements nor the consciousness of its
indubitable Being. However, since this consciousness of an absolute positivity
and identity does exist, Schelling concludes that it must derive from an experience
that is prior to the mirror play of negations and that grounds it in its Being (see
SW, 1/4, 358; 1/6, 185). Even the subsistence of negation as negation is already
something that cannot be conceived as the effect of negation: existence is not an
implication of its concept. If one claims that negation is the ground of a resultant
Being (for it does indeed possess, in the possibility of its duplication, the capacity
of its self-sublation for the benefit of something positive), then one simultane-
ously has to keep in mind that it is not already transformed into the generating
force of Being simply by virtue of this capacity; it is rather only transformed into
the ideal ground of Being. This actually does not say any more than this: there
is no concept of Being outside the one that appears on the horizon of a self-
sublation of reflection. This in turn only means that the doubly reflective negation
can retreat for the benefit of Being and thereby allow Being to appear (thus it is
the ground for the appearance of Being); but this also means that neither its own
Being, nor the Being of that which it negates, is affirmed. This is both immedi-
ately and analytically intelligible: negation can destroy (even itself), but it cannot
create, if it affirms a Being in its play (for example, its own Being), then by this
very affirmation it is granted that we are dealing with something more and other
than with an immanent characteristic of negation itself. One could call this, fol-
lowing Sartre, the "ontological proof of reflection (EN, 27ff.). There are several
conclusions that can be drawn from it. First of all, one can conclude that Being
is prior to consciousness and that this insight is sealed in the very failure of the
immanent attempt of autonomous self-foundation. Second, one can conclude (and
this, of course, is closely related to the first conclusion), that while essence (or
reflection) is the knowledge ground of Being (and also of its own Being), it is yet
not its real ground. As soon as it (essence) is, it is "unprethinkingly being." That
means that, in order simply to fulfill the formal-ontological condition of Being-
essence, it has previously to be. Sartre characterized this state of affairs with the
neologism tre t. With this he means that conceptual beingessenceis sup-
ported (carried) in its Being by transreflective Being, since in itself it is actually
nonautonomous. Without standing on the firm ground of a Being that is not re-
flection, it would necessarily dissolve into nothingness. That is the meaning
of Schelling's notion of a "negative philosophy"; it is characterized by a
self-forgetting speculation that absolves itself from its own existing by reducing
the "absolutely transcendent Being" to a determination of essence (Wesensbe-
stimmung).
All of this is quite difficult to understand and formulate. Nevertheless, we can-
not spare ourselves the effort of becoming conscious of the interwovenness of
Schelling's two objections. The fact that he introduces the notion of a "transcen-
Z/8 U LhL' l UKC 1 /
dent Being" is for Schelling an implicit consequence of the failure of the model
of reflection. This perhaps becomes apparent in the following parallel: just as
reflection must be grounded in a prereflective and nonrelational familiarity with
itself, the synthesis of semblance and resemblance (Schein und Widerschein) must
be grounded in a presynthetic identity that has to be conceived as nonrelational
"Being." However, both prereflective self-consciousness and the Being to which
reflection appeals transgress the limits of what Lacan calls the captation narcis-
sique du soi and open up the theory of self-consciousness for an Other that is no
longer, as in Hegel, the Other of itself.
Lecture 18
Our lectures on neostructuralism now stand at the threshold of the question that
I consider to be the most decisive one, namely, how neostructuralism explains
the phenomenon of subjectivity or how it deconstructs traditional models of sub-
jectivity. One cannot criticize a theory without proving either the nonexistence
of the phenomenon to which this theory refers, or the incorrectness of its ar-
gumentation with regard to this phenomenon. As to the first of these, the nonexis-
tence of subjectivity designates an exaggeratedly radical position, one William
James takes in his provocative essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?,"
1
but one that
is not taken by Derrida. We saw on the contrary that Derrida does not dispute
the phenomenon of self-consciousness, but rather that he wants to explain it in
another way than in the language and with the means of modern metaphysics; he
describes it as an "effect" of differential relations between the elements of an un-
limited play of "marks."
That is nothing new to us. To understand better what Derrida wants to say with
this programmatic formula, we picked up an initiative to which Derrida himself
encourages us: we tried to discover by means of comparison whether what Der-
rida calls diffrance is really so different from the (active) "differentiating rela-
tion" Hegel proposes in an early version of his Logic,
We saw that there is indeed something like a "deep affinity" between these
two positions. We made the observation earlier that when Derrida talks about
differentiality he uses the term "negation" in the sense of "being other than . . ."
That means that each term is what it is by virtue of a differing reference to all
other terms. Since this reference leads on into infinity (there is no a priori limit
279
280 LECTURE 18
of the differentiating reference to others), there is no definitive identity of a term
with itself, and thus there is also no definitive identity of the self with itself.
For Hegel's idea of autonomous negation this last consequence does not hold.
To negate, for him, means not only "to distinguish" but also "to sublate." If one
applies it to itself, negation has the possibility of canceling itself and thus produc-
ing the Other of negation, namely, something positive. In a final intensification
of his "basic operation with negation," Hegel tries to show about this Other of ne-
gation that it can simultaneously be understood as the Other of negation itself,
and thus as identical with it. Derrida does not go along with this speculative con-
clusion. He stands fast, to put it in Hegelian terms, at the logic of difference and
does not advance further to the consequences of what Hegel calls the logic of con-
tradiction, in which the related elements bring each other "to the ground" (zugrun-
derichten) in order to give way to the unity of their "grounding identity."
But we not only compared Hegel's and Derrida's positions; rather we put to
both the question of whether they can theoretically explain to us the everyday ex-
perience of our Being familiar with ourselves. We saw that Hegel believes that
the knowledge of this identity was already guaranteed with the proof of the iden-
tity of self-referential negation with its Other. This is, however, not the case, or,
at least, only at the price of apetitioprincipii. Reflection can recognize as identi-
cal to itself only that whose identity it already previously has known. This prior
familiarity with itself cannot, however, be the work of autonomous reflection it-
self, for all reflection is relative; i.e., it is the relation of two to each other, and
these two are thus to this extent not simply one. In other words, the relation of
two with each other never explains their identity in the form of something in-
dubitably evident, unless this identity was known previously and is only recog-
nized in the play of reflected-reflecting.
When we talk about self-consciousness, it is not enough to say that in it an iden-
tity of two elements related to each other takes place. One also has to be able to
demonstrate that and how these two can know each other as one and the same;
and that is precisely what Hegel's philosophy of reflection cannot do.
One could conclude from this that Derrida has good reasons for not subscrib-
ing to this theory. But this is not necessarily the case. For although Derrida rejects
the consequences of Hegel's "reconciliation," he still does not dispute that self-
consciousness must fundamentally be conceived according to the model of reflec-
tion. The difference between him and Hegel in this instance is merely that Hegel
believes that reflection leads to the knowledge of a self that is identical with itself,
whereas Derrida believes that reflection leads to the knowledge of a self that is
not identical with itself. Hence both consider the relation we have in mind when
we use the reflexive pronoun "itself to be a fundamental and insurmountable state
of affairs for our notion of the T or of "self-consciousness."
But precisely this can be disputed. With regard to Hegel I have already
sketched the reasons. Against Derrida I would object that if one sought to make
LECTURE 18 281
his idea consistent, one would necessarily fall into the absurdity of denying the
subsistence of something like familiarity with ourselves. But that would not only
be contradictory to what he himself gives as his intention (namely, wanting only
to explain self-consciousness differently than is done by metaphysics); it would
ultimately come down to a denial of the fact that we can associate a meaning with
the terms "the self," "consciousness," and "the I" in our everyday language. The
functioning of language itself contradicts this.
But let's look a little closer at Derrida's conclusion. Formulated in its most ex-
treme, it states that "self-consciousness" is an effect of differential relations be-
tween marks of an unlimited "structure." This statement presupposes that what
metaphysics calls consciousness occurs only when something else is also taking
place, namely, a relation between a (limited) arbitrarily large set of data (Gege-
benheiten) differing from one another. Without at least two things or marks and
(in the language of the late Saussure) aposmes differing from each other, con-
sciousness (and self-consciousness) does not factually occur.
If one really wants to explain consciousness on the basis of the autonomous
play of differences as such, one has to avoid predetermining for this relation
something like an originary familiarity of consciousness with itself, which is out-
side of this play.
2
And Derrida, in fact, avoids exactly this. Second, one would
have to avoid attributing the characteristic "conscious" to any states of affairs (or
marques, or, in Lacan's terminology, signifiants) before they have been brought
into relation to each other (since consciousness is supposed to be a feature, or,
to be more correct, an effect of their being related).
As far as this last point is concerned, there is no way of knowing which specific
characteristic in the field of a relational structure is supposed to make it possible
for me to distinguish conscious relations from unconscious relations (which
would lead to the conclusion that there are no unconscious relations: a conclusion
that would radically contradict Derrida's notion of a "structural unconscious"). If
one can imagine, however, that there are relations between the elements of struc-
ture, but that there is not necessarily also consciousness of relations, then the rela-
tion of Being other than . . . is "not an appropriate candidate for the description
or definition of consciousness."
3
This objection reproduces, mutatis mutandis,
the objection Schelling directed at Hegel, namely, that nothing in the play of the
mutually related elements mediates the information that it is a matter of the same
elements. In other words, two or more elements related to each other reveal a
great deal, but they do not reveal that they are identical to each other and, further-
more, that they are aware of this.
If this negative conclusion is compelling, then the indubitable fact of our
familiarity with ourselves has to be explained differently. And this by no means
is accomplished, as the overzealous defenders of neostructuralism always assume
to be the case for their opponents, by reintroducing a predifferential or presemio-
logical self-consciousness. On the contrary, we already saw that, for example,
282 LECTURE 18
an idealist philosopher like Schleiermacher, for whom self-consciousness was no
principle, but certainly a cardinal theme, a touchstone, so to speak, for the truth
of philosophizing, by no means denies that self-consciousness, as he puts it, is
"somehow, but regardless of how, determined." This determination can, indeed
wants to be understood as a significant imprint, as a marque non-prsente et
diffrentielle. The decisive difference between Schleiermacher's and Derrida's ex-
planation of consciousness is that the latter is finally forced to sacrifice the
phenomenon certainly, against his own will whereas the former is able to
mediate the thought of our familiarity with ourselves with the other (thought) of
the dependency of the self on linguistic structure.
This last possibility in fact exists, if one recalls what I have indicated in earlier
contexts, namely, that there are (at least) two forms of dependence, and thus, cor-
respondingly, two forms of grounding: dependences of certain states of affairs
on thoughts, and dependences of certain states of affairs on other states of affairs.
The former is called in the language of metaphysics ideal ground or knowledge
ground; the latter is called real ground or Being ground (rationes cognoscendi
versus rationes essendi).
Now the dependence of consciousness on the differential relations between
marks is in no way a real dependence, or, expressed differently, a dependence
of consciousness with regard to its reality. Even if the structuralists or the neo-
structuralists wanted to appeal in this instance to Saussure, they would not find
support for this view even in the official version of the Cours. Saussure, rather,
rigorously differentiated the oppositive relations, which separate signs from each
other and give them their profile, from the relations that connect the material
sound and consciousness (meaning) in the sign synthesis. According to Saussure
there are relations of the type simile-simile (e.g., between different phonemes,
words, signs, or grammatical categories), and relations of the type simile-
dissimile (these are the relations between words and ideas) (CGL, 115-16). Now
Saussure did not propose that what we can call the semiological synthesis (i.e.,
the synthesis of image acoustique and ide) comes into being exclusively by
means of the differential relations between sounds. Differential articulation is no
less, but also no more, than a necessary prerequisite for semiological synthesis,
but not already its positive Being ground. Saussure's second lecture is even
clearer on this point than the version that was edited by Bally and Sechehaye.
There he says (and I am blending several passages into one quote):
The vocal sound . . . is the instrument of thought . . . without ex-
isting for itself, independently of thought. . . . The vocal sound is not
a word except to the exact, constant extent that a meaning is attached to
it. . . .
On the contrary it is signification which delimits [into units] the
words in the spoken mass. . . . The unit does not pre-exist. Significa-
LECTURE 18 283
tion is what creates it. The units are not there to receive a signification.
(Clearly then, it is meaning that creates the unit.)
The sound, by itself, does not produce significance; we are faced
with incorporeal entities. . . .
In itself, [the Greek expression] X-Eyouxtfa signifies nothing. . . .
Thought is what delimits units; sound itself does not delimit them in
advance: there is always a relation with thought, . . . it is always a
matter of the cutting out that thought does in the spoken mass which is
amorphous. . . .
Difference is what makes things meaningful, and signification is what
creates differences, too. (CFS, 15 [1957], 7-8, 41-42, 28, 82, 68, 76)
What all these passages have in common is that they deny a direct causality be-
tween differentiality and meaning: meaning is not simply the "effect" of differen-
tial relations between sons. It is rather the other way round: only by means of
an interpretation, whose initiator is thought (consciousness, the individual), does
an oppositive structure of significants become discourse {parole), i.e., something
meaningful and conscious. In this sense Saussure can also say that it is interpreta-
tion which posits the distinction of units (CFS, 15 [1957J, 89; cf. 92). For him
this follows from the difference between the relations of the type simile-simile and
those of the type simile-dissimile\ and while the latter type presupposes the
former, it cannot, however, simply be deduced from it.
If we go back to the traditional distinction between real ground and ideal
ground, then we could say that the differential relation between the marques of
structure is not the real ground of the subsistence of consciousness, but rather
only the ideal ground of its determination (or, to be more precise, of the con-
sciousness of the determination of states of affairs). Picking up another traditional
distinction, one can also express this by saying that relationality/differentiality is
indeed a necessary but by no means a sufficient condition for the existence of con-
sciousness (self-consciousness included).
I would like to make this a little more concrete. It is in fact true (and even a
commonplace of late idealist and romantic philosophy) that consciousness (in-
cluding self-consciousness) is not the author of itself, but rather that it ex-
periences itself as inescapably thrown into the determination of being a self. To
that extent it is not master of itself. Indeed, it presupposes, aside from its mere
Being, in addition a series of opposites without which it would not be able to de-
termine and grasp itself as that which it is. And what could this series of opposites
be other than that which the structuralists call structure (of a language, of a dis-
course, of a tradition, etc.)? But this dependence on structure is not real; rather
it is ideal. The dependence of any conceivable determination on a prior Being is
real. But consciousness as the knowing subject is, in the final analysis, dependent
on structure. It simply cannot concretize itself without referring to an overriding
system of relations between marks; but these relations do not simply produce con-
284 LECTURE 18
sciousness, they serve exclusively its ideal self-determination. This process can
by no means be characterized as pure suffering on the side of the subject. One
cannot suffer under meanings in the same sense as one suffers under strokes of
fortune or material determinations. Significations are beings of a sort that occur
only when the marks of the relational structure have previously been interpreted.
Interpretation is not a natural occurrence, but rather an act of culture. Cultures
determine subjects in terms of motivation: they provide subjects with a system
of already interpreted signs, but they never determine fully the sense in which
the subject uses them (i.e., interprets or reinterprets them). In other words, the
subject is passive and dependent only to the extent that it cannot choose that al-
ready interpreted system of marks in which it has to take up its cultural and social
identification. But it is free to the extent that it lends meaning to, and brings into
expression, the pregiven signs, which, indeed, are nothing other than an ensem-
ble of appeals for our interpretation.
We can therefore agree with Derrida when he disputes that the self is a timeless
self-presence. We can also follow him when he says that the differential structure
divides the self from itself, without allowing him any return to a predifferential
unity. And we can even accept, against Hegel, that under these circumstances no
structure is conceivable that exhausts, subdues, and collects its "effects of mean-
ing" in an ultimately valid and terminal concept.
We will take exception only to the simple confusion of the phenomenon of the
self with the differentiality of the system. But this conclusion is entirely unneces-
sary, even if it is a matter of grounding the phenomenon of the nonclosability of
structure. For this it is completely sufficient to show that consciousness as such
is a being that in its Being is concerned about its Being, as Heidegger says. On
the basis of pregiven "symbolic orders" that it did not choose, it transgresses these
orders by virtue of its essential nonidentity with itself This nonidentity with itself
forces the subject to interpret its Being: since it is not simply that which is given
to it through tradition (through structure), it has to produce its meaning by means
of a projection into the future. If it were to coincide with structure, it would be
identical with it and thus also identical with itself, something Derrida refuses to
accept. The only possibility of escaping identification with the pregiven system
of signs results from the fact that this system of signs unfolds its meaning only
under the condition of an interpretation: viewed as a pure product of nature, every
symbolic order remains mute and unarticulated. In other words, signs are hypoth-
eses; they unfold their meaning only for such a being that transgresses their
materiality in a projection from which sounds, tones, and graphic traces can be
identified as signifiers. It is not sufficient, as we saw, that these signifiers are
negatively related to each other: that is also the case for the things in nature, and
this is not enough to allow them to gain a human meaning. We simply cannot at-
tribute meaning to any state of affairs solely on the basis of its being differentially
related to other states of affairs. First of all, the category "meaning" could only
LECTURE 18 285
mean meaning-for-a-consciousness (Lacan, for example, concedes this when he
says: "since nothing is represented only for"; , 316); no "signifier" could "sig-
nify" solely on the basis of itself, as an object of nature in relation to other objects
of nature.
4
Second, the idea of an autonomously conceived differentiality simply
does not explain the subsistence of consciousness for which signifiers can
have a meaning. This certainly does not yet positively describe what
self-consciousness is; however, it seems to me to be demonstrated that self-
consciousness can justifiably be attributed a manner of reality, and that it can
successfully defend its reality against the neostructuralist attempt to let it dissolve
(or rather, disappear) in the gap of differance.
Let's take a closer look at the thesis that consciousness is not identical with it-
self. As a being that in its Being relates interpretively to its Being, it is ekstatically
always beyond itself. But the "itself beyond which it is, is first and foremost its
structural condition: the pregiven framework of an already interpreted "world"
(in Heidegger's language) or of a "symbolic order" (to speak with Lacan). It is
separated from this presupposition insofar as it continuously determines anew the
meaning of its past by projecting itself onto its future; it accomplishes this in such
a way that it never coincides with a specific state of its interpretation. This ekstatic
nonidentical Being of the self is even the presupposition for the structurality of
structure; for in order not only to constitute an ensemble of natural differences,
structure requires a transgressing interpretation from which the Being of the sign
substances, which in itself is meaningless, is "cleared" and "disclosed" in terms
of its (cultural, or, if you will, symbolic) value. Now it is completely impossible
to determine this meaning, about which the future of the projection will decide,
on the basis of its past: the past only then attains its symbolic (i.e., its signifying)
quality when it is transgressed. To this extent there is no determinism of struc-
ture. The subjective projections by means of which the individuals endowed with
the possibility for meaning transgress their having become Being cannot be
deduced from the concept of the structure pregiven to them; this is the case be-
cause it is they (the individuals) who first invent a concept for the whole whose
elements they simultaneously are. In other words, the significance of the whole
exists nowhere else than in the consciousnesses of the individuals who internalize
the pregiven universal in each instance in a particular and singular manner, and
reexternalize it again to the general by means of their deeds. This has two implica-
tions: first, the concept of the universal (or of structure) is separated from itself
by the intervention of an individual, i.e., it loses its semantic and normative iden-
tity (in other words, a singular interpretation separates its universality from itself;
by the same token, it simultaneously separates the individual from itself, at least
to the extent that it in its Being is an element of structure); second, the concept
of the universal exists not only in one but in uncontrollably many interpretations
(in as many as there are individuals within a community); each one of these in-
terpretations can only subsume another one in the form of a hermeneutic "divina-
286 D LECTURE 18
tion," and each divination carries an index of uncontrollability: none attains the
status of an objective, self-identical knowledge.
But, you will probably object, didn't we just abandon the concept of self-
consciousness after all? What about the unity of subjectivity that has to identify
its past by means of a circular movement from its future and that therefore cannot
really identify it? Derrida actually reproached the Heidegger of Being and Time
with half-heartedness for wanting to rescue a sort of circular (i.e., dialectical)
unity for the ekstatic self ("Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and
Time").
Can this movement-which one must not hasten to denounce as useless
restatement, and which has something essential to do with the move-
ment of thoughtbe distinguished both from the Hegelian circle of
metaphysics or ontotheology, and from that circle into which, Heideg-
ger tells us so often, we must learn to enter in a certain way? (Mar-
gins, 60)
5
Heidegger, in fact, arrived at his thesis about the circular unity of subjectivity (he
calls it Dasein) only because he held on tounder modified circumstances, of
coursethe model of reflection for self-consciousness: according to him, the self
does not possess any prior familiarity with itself; it is first of all without any con-
tent, and it must be shown what it is by that in the direction of which it is project-
ing itself. Heidegger calls this, as we know, the "relucency" that the self ex-
periences from the ekstatically projected thing. We also recall that Sartre has
already objected to this theory (which Derrida will even outdo by denying the pos-
sibility of reidentification of the ekstatic self with itself) with the argument that
one cannot derive the function of consciousness and self-consciousness from the
structure of the ekstatic projection or understanding, except at the price of its self-
presupposition:
We cannot first suppress the dimension "consciousness," not even if it is
in order to reestablish it subsequently. Understanding has meaning only
if it is consciousness of understanding. (BN, 85)
We have gathered additional evidence that supports this objection from the obser-
vation that the form of a negative referentiality of marks to each other cannot fun-
damentally illuminate the function of consciousness because ekstasis or differen-
tiality provides only necessary but no positive conditions for self-Being.
And yet one can indeed assume a prereflective familiarity of consciousness
with itself without becoming entangled in comparable circles (like Hegel and
Heidegger), and without denying the nonidentity of reflection with itself. In order
to accomplish this, one only has to understand that everything of which conscious-
ness consists does not itself fall under the immanence of consciousness. It is sim-
ply a false explanatory model that conceives self-consciousness as a case of reflec-
LECTURE 18 U 287
tion, i.e., as the explicit relation of a consciousness to itself as its own object.
If one abandons this self-contradictory and circular idea, then one can see that
what we called the nonidentity of the self is only grounded in its ekstatic structure
of projection, and by no means in an absence of familiarity with itself. Ekstati-
cally related to the object of its projections, the subject never coincides absolutely
with its Being (i.e., with its having become Being); but it certainly has a con-
sciousness of itself as a projection that does not coincide with itself. How else
would the philosopher be able to express this sentence meaningfully? Identity and
nonidentity, furthermore, are relational concepts. If they are to be employed in
a nontrivial manner, then something that is not self-understood has to be able to
be brought to experience by means of an act of identification or of nonidentifica-
tion. In this sense it would be totally incorrect to say (and Wittgenstein was com-
pletely correct in this) that in the case of self-consciousness we are dealing with
the action of an identification. The self that is familiar with itself does not accom-
plish any self-identification; it is familar to itself even before it projects itself onto
contents in the light of which it interprets its own (as it were, objective) Being.
In other words, identification and discrimination presuppose consciousness, yet
they are not able and do not want to produce it. "The familiarity of consciousness
with itself," Dieter Henrich writes, "can never be understood as the result of an
activity."
6
Consciousness can be understood neither as "effect" of differential rela-
tions between marks nor as effect of the work of identification: consciousness al-
ways already exists when such actions are initiated. In short, self-consciousness
is not a phenomenon to which the categories of identity and difference could
meaningfully be applied. These categories only first take hold in the field of the
ekstatic self-relating of self-consciousness to something, be it the object of its own
projection directed into the future, or a state of affairs of the world, or even itself
as the result of a reflective self-thematization that always already presupposes
difference and temporal distance.
We have put numerous critical questions to Derrida regarding his attempt at
a deconstruction of the concepts of subjectivity and self-consciousness. We have
concerned ourselves primarily with Derrida's work because it puts subjectivity
into question on a philosophical level, and in this sense it stands almost entirely
alone within the framework of neostructuralism. That, of course, does not mean
that other authors have not also made significant contributions to the theme of the
subject and self-consciousness. I am thinking above all of Jacques Lacan, in
whose work "subjectivity" in the distinction between a veritable and a narcissis-
tic subjectivity plays a particularly important role. As a psychoanalyst and psy-
chiatrist Lacan would presumably be somewhat displeased if we were to make
him into a philosopher and examine his writings exclusively from the point of
view of the epistemological and speculative issues they address. On the other
hand, it cannot be denied that neither Derrida's nor Deleuze's nor even Foucault's
288 D LECTURE 18
views about the subject would have been possible without the fundamental im-
pulses derived from Lacan's crits, impulses they picked up on and altered, each
in his own way, to be sure, and often enough in spirited contradiction to the mas-
ter. The predecessorship of Lacan can be explained to a large extent simply by
the fact that an entire generation separates his biography and intellectual growth
from those of his younger colleagues and critics. Lacan was born in 1901 (i.e.,
exactly a year after Gadamer and four years before Sartre). He had already for-
mulated some of his essential ideas in the thirties, i.e., long before the advent of
a human-scientific structuralism in France. His most essential and, in terms of
their effective-historical reception, most influential texts, however, were written
in the fifties and the first half of the sixties. Their appearance thus still predates
the year 1968, which we, in a coarsely schematic fashion, marked as the begin-
ning of the actual neostructuralist movement. Taking Lacan into consideration,
we might now feel ourselves forced to move this date of inception ahead some-
what, for I believe I will be able to show in what follows that neostructuralism's
essential objections to the unity of meaning, system, and subjectivity are outlined
(and, often enough, even thoroughly developed) in his texts. Yet it is not difficult
to understand why these texts only realize their true effect in the era of neostruc-
turalism: for what Lacan thought always stood in conflict with the classical forma-
tion of a taxonomical structuralism.
There is no single essay or set of lectures by Lacan that would sum up the es-
sence of his teaching. Of course, that is just as true for the other authors we are
dealing with here. But the basic ideas of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, or Lyotard
can be distilled much more easily than is the case with Lacan out of an examina-
tion of just a few of their works. We can summarize his writings let's be more
cautious and say: his utterances in a preliminary way by characterizing them as
a play of cross-references and allusions whose pertinence can be verified either
philologically or through logical argumentation in only a very few cases. Anyone
who seeks to get some idea of the implicit unity of Lacan's thought assumes an
adventurous interpretive responsibility that, to be sure, can also be called excit-
ing. Lacan's work has just as often served as a thought quarry from which bab-
blers and delirious ravers mine their unconnected fantasies, as it has served as
the basis for the primarily interdependent interpretations that comprise the few
serious attempts to understand Lacan's fundamental ideas. To understand Lacan
means to reformulate him: it means to continue on with what he himself did with
those texts on which his work is supported. This maxim is all the more true since
Lacan's criture often, if not most of the time, does not so much actually want
to clarify the effects of the (Freudian) unconscious, as it wants to represent these
effects linguistically and stylistically. Thus his interpreter often steps into traps
or snares whose manifest meaning conceals a deeper nonmeaning. (I don't want
to deny that the opposite of this also occurs.) On the other hand, it is precisely
the elusiveness of Lacan's crits that presents a special challenge to the interpreter
LECTURE 18 289
whose conviction about the universality and inescapability of "understanding"
will not allow circumvention of any texts. And Lacan, after all, did not conceive
his texts as absolute linguistic works of art, but, as he himself asserted again and
again, first and foremost as constructive interpretations of the effects and the
mechanism of the unconscious. In this sense, the Ecrits do indeed practice a form
of practical hermeneutics with which we must now make ourselves familiar in a
general way. In other words, if we fail initially to characterize in principle both
the mode of Lacan's criture and the object of his theory, we will have great
difficulty in assessing his utterances on that matter that interests us the most,
namely, on subjectivity and self-consciousness.
First of all, we should not overlook the fact that it is rather questionable to
speak of Lacan's hermeneutics. This is true not only because his work, in spite
of all the incursions it never tires of making into neighboring disciplines like phi-
losophy and literary theory, grew completely out of his interest in psychoanaly-
sis; it is also true because his work addresses a series of rather discomforting
questions to the notions of "understanding" and "knowing." First of all, there is
the question (which we will find again in the neostructuralists) as to whether her-
meneutics is not a procedure that aims at moving beyond the expressions (of a
text or a discourse) to arrive at their meaning. Hermeneutics, Lacan objects, deals
with the business of semantics: it wants to know what the text says and of what
it is speaking. In a certain sense, it wants to get behind the text or press on into
a sphere beyond the text, where it presumes it can find not in Gadamer, to be
sure, but perhaps in Ricoeur-something like a kernel of truth and unequivocal-
l y. This, however, is not at all what Lacan seeks to accomplish. What he himself
calls "truth" would rather consist in dissolving an alleged kernel of unequivocality
and clarity, returning it to the obscurity from whence it stepped forward as a prod-
uct of hermeneutical misunderstanding.
What is it, we might then ask, that one can search for in a text if not for its
meaning? Perhaps Lacan would answer that one can investigate the textuality of
the text itself, the manner of its interwovenness, insofar as it and only it is the
prerequisite for the effets de sens. Certainly, there is something like a meaning
of the text (Lacan is far from denying this), but for him meaning is an "effect";
i.e., it is nothing originary and it does not stand for any principle.
Now one does not have to imagine the relationship of the text to that which
it produces (i.e., to "meaning") as an interaction of two levels of structure, in the
sense of something like a deep structure that is prior to or founds the actually spo-
ken surface utterances. Lacan does not believe that there are two languages, the
unconscious and the conscious. He rather believes that there is only one, but that
this one our everyday language carries the traces of the unconscious precisely
in its normality. And it is here that the analyst can track them down.
That actually sounds, one might say, like a recasting of the classical hermeneu-
tical procedure into a psychoanalytic form. And, in fact, we can find the exprs-
290 G LECTURE 18
sion "interpretation" in Lacan; and it occurs with its affimative and, so to speak,
conventional meaning when he says:
Interpretation is not open to all meanings. It is not just any interpreta-
tion. It is a significant interpretation, one that must not be missed. This
does not mean that it is not this signification that is essential to the ad-
vent of the subject. What is essential is that he should see, beyond this
signification, to what signifierto what irreducible, traumatic non-
meaninghe is, as a subject, subjected.
7
This passage is a good example for the ambiguity in the use of the word "interpre-
tation" that is characteristic of Lacan. On the one hand, he does not refrain from
portraying himself as an interpreter (and he even adds that there is a minimal
delimitation of nonsense in a text: "the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the
subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud's own term, of non-sense").
8
On the other
hand, he insists that the assertion of a semantic kernel in discourse does not stand
in the service of the theory of an autonomous subject that projects its meaning:
the subject and its meaning are "effects" of what he calls the signifiant.
Nonetheless, one can still designate Lacan's work as a "hermeneutics." The
reference to Freud, who already understood his Interpretation of Dreams in much
this sense, confirms this, and the famous hermeneutical study on Freud by Paul
Ricoeur has the appropriate title De l'interprtation: Essai sur Freud.
9
Freud him-
self stated very clearly what, in his view, is the nature of analytical interpreting.
The task of interpretation is to uncover the latent dream idea within the manifest
dream content. To uncover means to raise to consciousness. The content of a
drive or a wish that is successfully made conscious no longer can be effective as
an unconscious obsession; the subject can now get hold of it.
Psychoanalytic work has often been characterized in German-speaking coun-
tries with such a formula or a similar one. In particular the psychoanalytic her-
meneutics of the second Frankfurt School tended to interpret this as though it
were a matter of bringing a "systematically distorted" discourse back under con-
trol, i.e., of cleansing it of its irrational dross and returning it to the mastery of
a rational, and thus responsible, subject.
There is a famous phrase from the thirty-first lecture of Freud's New Introduc-
tory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: "Where id was, there ego shall be."
10
Ricoeur,
Lorenzer, and Habermas, for example, believe that they can base themselves on
this statement when they propose the following interpretation: where once un-
consciously oppressive obligations were in power, whose intolerability drove
certain ideational complexes (Vorstellungskomplexe) out of the economy of the
personality, the self-conscious I is now to be in charge again. This is basically
in line with the idealist tradition. Already Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind de-
scribed historical process as a battle in which self-consciousness wins out in the
end by understanding everything that came before as its own, still untransparent
LECTURE 18 291
content. History is the history of self-consciousness as it comes to itself out of
the unconscious. It follows from this that the unconscious is not essentially uncon-
scious, but rather that in its essence, i.e., in its truth, it is identical with conscious-
ness. The unconscious is thus an unpenetrated appearance that attaches itself to
consciousness in the condition of its immediacy, and which discloses itself as
mere appearance over the course of that process of self-enlightenment that idealist
philosophy since Schelling has been engaged in describing.
Lacan interprets the quoted statement from Freud's lecture in a totally different
manner than that in which until recently it has been interpreted in the German tra-
dition. This interpretation simultaneously demonstrates the direction in which he
displaces the signification of the terms "interpretation" and "hermeneutics." Lacan
begins by emphasizing using Freud's statement that has frequently been echoed
by modern poets that "the I is not master in its own house." You are certainly
familiar with Kafka's story "A Country Doctor." In a freezing night, a doctor is
suddenly called to an uncurably ill patient, but he has no horses. They unexpect-
edly break out of a pigsty, whereupon we read: "You never know what you're
going to find in your own house."
11
But what does it mean that one never knows this? Lacan gives us the following
aid for our reading: in one of his few programmatic texts, in his lecture to the
Socit Franaise de philosophie in 1957 on "La psychanalyse et son enseigne-
ment," he writes:
In the unconscious that is less deep than it is inaccessible to conscious
study in depth, id speaks: a subject in the subject, transcendent to the
subject, poses to the philosopher since the science of dreams its ques-
tion. ([Fr. d.], 437)
This is a difficult and apparently contradictory statement, which at one stroke
returns us to the context of our central question regarding the theory of the subject
in neostructuralism. The statement claims that there are two subjects: one of them
is the traditional one itself, which we refer to as the subject (the only one we are
acquainted with); the other one is the id, i.e., the unconscious (in Freud's sense)
that speaks from within the subject, but in such a way that its speech cannot be
understood by the conscious subject. After all, Lacan says: "transcendent to the
subject."
"Where id was, there ego shall be." Now we can ask the question: which ego
is the id supposed to become, since there apparently are two I's or two subjects?
In French, unlike in Freud's mother tongue, there are two words that designate
the first-person singular pronoun: je and moi. Je is used to characterize the subject
as the condition of possibility, be it for an action, a recognition, or a statement;
moi is used (among other things) if the subject is part of a reflexive relation: "c'est
moi qui vient de parler . . .," "or moi, je trouve," etc. The philosophical inter-
pretability of this opposition that French grammar provides is already docu-
292 LECTURE 18
mented in an early essay by Jean-Paul Sartre from the thirties, "La Transcendance
de TEgo." What is at question here can, of course, be explicated just as well with-
out reflecting on French grammar. Lacan also calls the Je (which he usually
capitalizes) the "true subject"; the moi he calls the "reflective," or even the "narcis-
sistic," "imaginary," or "specular subject."
What is meant by this? If one uses the first-person singular pronoun, then one
designates the person who at this given moment is referring to him/herself. To
refer to oneself means, in specialized vocabulary, to reflect. "To reflect," more-
over (and we must recall issues we have already discussed), is originally a
metaphorical expression. It means, simply put, to mirror oneself. Precisely this
is what Narcissus does in the ancient myth: he looks into the water and falls in
love, being unfamiliar with the nature of the mirror effect (or not thinking about
it at the moment), with his own image. Now we understand why Lacan, when
he says moi, adds that this moi is the index word for the designation of the reflec-
tive, the specular (from the Latin word speculum, meaning "mirror"), the imagi-
nary (reproducing its own image), in short, for the narcissistic ego: for the ego
that looks at itself in its own mirror image or that identifies itself by means of its
own mirror image. The "other" that this moi thinks it perceives as an autonomous
being is in truth "imaginary"; i.e., it is only the other of itself. Therefore Lacan
spells this type of an "oihzr"/autre with a small a, and he refers to it as an objet
petit a.
Nevertheless, there is still the other ego, the Je. Lacan also calls it, as I men-
tioned earlier, "the true subject" or "the subject of the unconscious." He also
speaks of the sujet de l'Autre, and this time Autre is written with a capital A. The
graphic index indicates that this type of "Other" is really independent of the self-
reflection of the subject, and it implies that in this case we are not dealing with
the other of itself.
With these explanatory observations I hope to be able to prepare the way for
an understanding of Lacan's interpretation of Freud's statement, "Where id was,
there ego shall be." He paraphrases Freud's sentence in French by opening up the
parentheses, as it were, after each phrase and inserting his comments. We can
easily follow this, since text and commentary are given in two different lan-
guages:
Wo (Where) Es (the subject-devoid of any das or other objectivating
article) war (was-it is a locus of being that is referred to here, and that
in this locus) soil (must-that is, a duty in the moral sense, as is
confirmed by the single sentence that follows and brings the chapter to
a close) [Namely: "Es ist Kulturarbeit etwa die Trockenlegung der Zuy-
dersee" (It is a civilizing task rather like the drying out of the Zuyder-
see).] Ich (I, there must I-just as one declared, "this am I," before say-
ing "it is I"), werden (become that is to say, not occur (survenir), or
LECTURE 18 293
even happen (advenir), but emerge (venir au jour) from this very locus
in so far as it is a locus of being). (E, 128)
Let's not be disturbed by the slightly Heideggerian manner of expression. The in-
terpretation retains its validity even without this. For its point is that conscious-
ness or self-consciousness (in the sense of reflection) is not simply supposed to
grow out of the id, as in Hegel, Ricoeur, or Lorenzer; rather, quite to the con-
trary, out of the id there will grow a subject Other than the reflective subject,
namely "the true subject of the unconscious" (E, 128).
Lacan, thus, is of the opinion that the cultural task of psychoanalytic her-
meneutics will not consist in making the unconscious conscious, i.e., in reducing
the irreflective Je to the reflective moi; rather, on the contrary, it will consist in
leading a disturbance, motivated by the defensive reaction of the id, back to the
founding realm of that "absolute subject" to which Lacan attributes the almost
mystical-medial mode of Being of s tre. In order to give you a characteristic im-
pression of Lacan's rather free use of language, let me quote the passage in which
he justifies and explains his translation.
Thus I would agree, against the principles of the economy of significa-
tion that must dominate a translation, to force a little in French the
forms of the signifier in order to bring them into line with the weight of
a still rebellious signification, which the German carries better here,
and therefore to employ the homophony of the German es with the ini-
tial of the word "sujet" (subject). By the same token, I might feel more
indulgence, for a time at least, to the first translation that was given of
the word es, namely, "le soi" (the self). The "a" (id), which not with-
out very good reason, was eventually preferred, does not seem to me to
be much more adequate, since it corresponds rather to the German das,
as in the question, "Was ist dasl" and the answer "das isf ("c'est").
Thus the elided "c" that will appear if we hold to the accepted equiva-
lence, suggests to me the production of a verb, "s'tre" in which would
be expressed the mode of absolute subjectivity, in the sense that Freud
properly discovered it in its radical eccentricity: "There where it was"
("L o c'tait"), I would like it to be understood, "it is my duty that I
should come to being." (E, 128-29)
Making use of the numerous homophones that so frequently confuse a non-
French speaker, Lacan succeeds at the trick of making us believe that the actual
place of the subject (Sujet) is precisely where we would least expect it: in the id,
in the unconscious. The subject (sujet), by contrast, to which we reduce the un-
conscious or into which we want to transform the unconscious, precisely this sub-
ject Lacan considers to be the place of deception and the place where symptoms
are formed. Its alleged brightness and clarity deceive us about the fact that it is
Zy4 U L t L l UKt 15
derived, that it is secondary, that it is an effect of the subject to which Lacan attri-
butes the mode of Being of s'tre and to which he gives the name la subjectivit
absolue.
In our next lecture we will study more closely the relationship between these
two subjectivities.
Lecture 19
Moving toward a reconstruction of Lacan's theory of the subject we came across
the peculiar interpretation of Freud's statement, "Where id was, there ego shall
be." Lacan did not, for example, render it as "There where the id was, the moi
must arise," but rather as "There where id was (or: there where it was/itself was),
it is my duty that I should come to being" (, 129). In other words, Lacan used
a possibility that French grammar provides for the first-person singular pronoun
in order to distinguish^ and moi, not only with regard to their contextual func-
tion, but also with regard to their essence. The essence of the moi is reflexivity,
i.e., the fact that it is its own object, orand this is only another formulation of
the same thingthat it is its own image. One can also express this in the following
way: the self-relation that occurs in the specific form of a relation within the
moiti has the character of the imaginary.
Literally, the moi is an object-an object that fulfills a certain function
that we are here calling the function of the imaginary.
1
But what would be the essence of they>, of that subject that Lacan characterizes
as the "subject of the unconscious"? Well, Lacan attributes to it the mode of Being
of eccentricity, or, as he also likes to say, of "ex-sistence." The ye is, first of all,
not something, but rather itself: it is itself (il s'est), as Lacanexploiting the
homophony of the first letter of subject, Freud's Es, and the French reflexive pro-
noun (se), or the pronoun a (read before the subsequent vowel, thus: s\ ')
writes in an almost mystical formulation: the mode of Being of the je is the s'tre
or c'tre (E, 128-29). But such a wholly irreflective subject a subject without
9 QS
296 LECTURE 19
a double, without something identical with itfundamentally has no essence, if
essence means "to be something," "to be qualified through characteristics." That
means that whatever we can say about this ye that is curiously enclosed in itself
will miss its actual center, its Being. That is precisely why Lacan calls it "ex-
sistent" or "ec-centric" and adds that because of its eccentricity it invites misappre-
hension. This misapprehension consists in the identification of the "true subject"
with the moi, the subject reflected in itself that incorrectly identifies its reflective
opposite with itself. In this misapprehension of the true subject (je), Lacan says,
consists the actual, indeed, the only function of the moi.
At this point the ambiguity of a failure to recognize that is essential to
knowing myself (un mconnatre essentiel au me connatre) is in-
troduced. For, in this "rear view" (rtrovise), all that the subject can
be certain of is the anticipated image coming to meet him that he
catches of himself in his mirror. (E, 306)
The only homogeneous function of consciousness is in the imaginary
capture of the moi through its specular reflection and in the function of
the failure to recognize that remains attached to it. (E [Fr. d.], 832)
In order to be able to characterize the form of apprehending that rules in the self-
relation of the moi as a form of m/sapprehending, that which is excluded from
the circle of reflective "capture" in the form of, and by virtue of, reflection cannot
simply be external: there must be something that is misapprehended in reflection
and by reflection, and that is precisely the ye, the true subject without an internal
double. In other words, inside the moi there is something that, misapprehended
by the moi, is its true kernel; or the imaginary self-identification that occurs in
reflection is exposed as an ekstasis of the founding I that has stepped out of its
center onto the periphery and thus - ec-centrically opens up the space of a rela-
tion to itself that the moi spontaneously uses to identify its mirror image with
itself.
It is this subject unknown to the moi, misapprehended by the moi, der
Kern unseres Wesens, writes Freud in the chapter of the Traumdeutung
. . . -when Freud deals with the primary process, he wants to speak of
something that has an ontological meaning and that he calls the kernel
of our being.
The kernel of our being does not coincide with the moi. This is the
sense of analytic experience, and it is around this that our experience
has been organized. . . .
Undoubtedly the true ye is not moi. But this is not enough, for it is
always possible to set about believing that the moi is only an error of
the ye, a partial point of view, whose perspective could be broadened
by means of a mere coming to consciousness, enough for the reality
that it is a matter of attaining to in the analytic experience to be discov-
ered. What is important is the reciprocal, which must always be present
LECTURE 19 G 297
in our minds the moi is not the ye, is not an error, in the sense that
classical doctrine makes it a partial truth. It is something else a partic-
ular object within the subject's experience. Literally, the moi is an
object-an object that fulfills a certain function that here we call the im-
aginary function. . . . All that Freud has written aimed to reestablish
the exact perspective of the subject in relation to the moi.
I claim that this is essential and that it serves as the center around
which everything should be ordered. (Sminaire, II, 59, 60)
The quintessence of these passages, it seems to me, is the indication that the func-
tion of misapprehension imprinted in the moi cannot be interpreted as an error,
but rather that the moi arrives necessarily and for structural reasons at the point
at which it misapprehends the kernel of its essencethe true yeas the other of
itself, as son semblable, i.e., as itself. By thus inventing a fictitious essence for
the Being enclosed within it, it throws light on this ye at exactly that moment at
which it pronounces something incorrect about it. The eccentricity of the true
subject is in league with necessity, so that nothing can be said about its truth from
outside of the center and with the means of the "capture of self that is reflection."
If one calls "thinking" a cognitive activity that in some manner thrives as in
Descarteson the evidence of reflection, then one can characterize the eccentric
position of the moi to the ye in the way Lacan himself does in a famous passage.
I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. (, 166)
This does not mean that the evidence that Descartes ascertains does not exist. It
means that it only and exclusively exists for the self-experience of the moi, of the
subject that deceives itself about its Being. For the Being that is affirmed in the
cogito sum is not the Being in itself, but rather only the Being for myself, i.e.,
only that Being that stands across from me in the circle of reflection as my Being,
as the being of myself.
Lacan expressly underscores this.
What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my
thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think. (166)
This passage thus distinguishes between a Being for myself (or, put differently,
a Being of the sort that it is what is reflected in a relation of reflection) from a
Being of the sort that does not occur in reflection (thus an irreflective or trans-
reflective Being). That is not contradictory to Descartes's argument. Schelling al-
ready pointed this out when he showed that Descartes's error was not that he con-
sidered the Being evidenced in self-reflection to be immediately certain, but
rather that he took this reflected Being to be the entire Being. "That which is first
for me" does not have to be the first in itself (SW, 1/10, 4).
298 LECTURE 19
Now, obviously the phrase "/ am" is at the very most a point of depar-
ture for meand only for me; the context that is created by a connec-
tion to this sentence or to the immediate consciousness of one's own Be-
ing can, therefore, always only be a subjectively logical one. . . .
Philosophy thus does not advance at this point any further than to a
subjective certainty. (SW, 1/10, 5)
Schelling developed this objection in a very clever way (see SW, 11/1, 301). He
always arrived at the conclusion that with Descartes's cogito sum, "philosophy
was banished to the realm of the subjective and to the fact of merely subjective
consciousness" (SW, 1/10, 8).
The sum that is conceptualized in the cogito thus only means: sum qua
cogitans, I am as thinking, i.e., in this specific mode of Being that is
called thinking and which is only another mode of Being than, for ex-
ample, that of the body, whose mode of Being consists in the fact that
it^//s space. . . . The sum that is enclosed in the cogito does not,
therefore, have the meaning of an unconditioned "I am," but rather only
the meaning of an "I am in a particular way," namely, as thinking, as
being in the mode that is called thinking. Therefore, the Ergo sum can-
not imply: "I am in an unconditioned way," but only: "I am in a partic-
ular way." (SW, 1/10, 10-11)
At this point Schelling distinguishes Being itself from its mode of Being.
2
If think-
ing is, he concludes, then it is itself a mode of Being, a mode of how Being ap-
pears, but as appearance of Being and not as Being in itself. But Being does not
appear on its own, but rather by stepping into the circle of reflection: with this,
subsistent Being becomes apparent Being; Being becomes an appearing, or sim-
ply appearance: a lucency or appearance (Schein) which in reflection is faced with
its relucency or reflection (Widerschein). That which was Being becomes the
reflet of that relation whose structural totality Sartre described as reflet-refltant.
The reflet or appearance has, of course, in itself no independent Being: it requires
thematization by the refltant, i.e., it is nothing absolute, but rather something
relative, something literally in need of something else, something, as Schelling
says, not conditioned and indubitable, but rather only a being in a particular way
(SW, 1/10, 11). A being that is only in a certain way is in part a nonbeing, a nant
or a jj.fi ov: a relatively not-bing in comparison with Being-itself (SW, 1/10,
283-85). Only this not-being, Schelling concludes, has been affirmed by Des-
cartes as indubitable content of thought. Nothing is stated or determined about
Being as the ground of every mode of Being in this form of argument.
Schelling, by the way, formulates a second objection to Descartes's cogito
ergo sum. Let me at least sketch it briefly, since it also shows some parallels to
Lacan's thoughts. Schelling believes, namely, that not only the esse subsistens
(the unconditioned and indubitable Being) has not been proved by Descartes;
LECTURE 19 299
even the first part of the phrase, the "I think," remains dubitable. The I is nothing
originary or immediate, but rather the object of a reflection that thinking directs
at itself (SW, 1/10, 11). To be able to find this object and, above all, to be able
to identify it with thinking, this thinking must have existed prior to all reflection
and even have been familiar with itself.
Yes, true thinking must even be objectively independent of that subject
reflecting on it, or it will think all the truer the less of the subject [the
reflected I] is mixed in with it. Since it is thus two different things, that
which thinks and that which reflects on this thinking and posits it as
identical with itself, or, put differently, since there is an objective think-
ing that is independent of me, it could be deceived about that alleged
unity precisely because it attributes the originary thinking to itself; and
then the "I think" would mean no more than those other expressions I
also use: I digest, I produce fluids, I walk, I ride; for it is not really the
thinking being that walks or rides. Something thinks inside me, in me
something is thought: that is the fact of the matter, no matter that I
state with the same justification: "I dream" and "A dream came to me"
[es trumte mir\. The certainty that Descartes attributes to the cogito
ergo sum can thus not bear up under thinking itself. (SW, 1/10, 11-12)
Lacan, to get back to him, combines both arguments by connecting, or simply
identifying, the Being that reflection has not reached (somewhat unprecisely) with
the true, i.e., the nonreflected subject. He concludes that the statement cogito
ergo sum says no more than ubi cogito, ibi sum (, 165).
Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only in so far as I
think that I am in my thought. (E, 165)
That means that Descartes's statement addresses Being only as the immanent ob-
ject of thinking (of reflection), as the mere Being for myself of Being. It does not
address the true subject whose Being plays outside reflection and which is reduced
to appearance, to an imagein short, to something imaginary-when it fulfills
the function of that which is reflected. The true subject is, therefore, the Being
ground of reflection; not only does the opposite of this not apply, but the moi
necessarily deludes itself about its position over against the je, the latter thought
as pure s tre.
The famous phrase "I (je) am not where I think, therefore, I (je) am, where
I think not, or where I am not aware that I think" thus must be read against the
background of these observations. They'^ is completely unconscious. That may
be the case, you will say, but then how can we talk about it at all? We cannot talk
about it, Lacan answers, at least if "to talk" means to work with articulate mean-
ings. But we can do something else; we can ask from whence the meanings actu-
ally originate with which our consciousness operates and, indeed, in whose light
it first becomes comprehensible to itself.
300 LECTURE 19
We have arrived at the point at which Lacan's theory of consciousness and sub-
jectivity describes its kind of linguistic turn. We can anticipate vaguely by saying
that subjectivity has something to do with sign production, with meaning (Bedeu-
tung) in the active sense of the word. Sign production, furthermore, has some-
thing to do with articulation, with organization, with differentiation of the signify-
ing material (see E, 149ff., esp. 152-54). That's old hat, you will say. Certainly,
but we nevertheless still have to see how Lacan approaches it. Lacan says that
both the decentrality of the subject as well as its wish to sublate its ekstatic "ex-
sistence" in a conscious unity (that of the moi) originate in the organization of the
chain of significationan organization that always simultaneously has to be con-
ceived as the dismembering, as the amputation of members in the order of spatial
and temporal juxtaposition.
I am explaining to you that it is insofar as he is engaged in a play of
symbols, in a symbolic world, that man is a decentered subject. . . .
Fascination [inscribed in the specular capture of the moi) is abso-
lutely essential to the phenomenon of constitution of the moi. It is inso-
far it is fascinated that the uncoordinated, incoherent diversity of the
primal fragmentation acquires its unity. . . .
The fragmented body finds its unity in the image of the other, which
is its own anticipated image. {Sminaire, II, 63, 67, 72)
In other words, the true subject has to do with articulation; and the function of
the imaginary subject consists in permeating in the space of fiction the primal
separation that consciousness experiences in articulation. The wound inflicted by
the symbolization of the ye is imaginarily healed in a vision, indeed, in the image
of the moi that is identical with what it faces. In this sense, the moi exhausts itself
in the function of compensation for an originary deficiency, i.e., in the misappre-
hension of its true mode of Being. It is this misapprehension that allows self-
consciousness to be able to become something imaginary. It becomes something
imaginary because despite all this it is the true subject that speaks in the circle
of reflection ("in the unconscious, excluded from the system of the moi, the sub-
ject speaks"; Sminaire, II, 79). For even reflection is constructed over a signi-
ficant distance in which articulation manifests itself. If one wants to bridge a dis-
tance to oneself, this presupposes the acknowledgment of this distance as the
more originary phenomenon. The imaginary aspect of the wish to identify oneself
with oneself assumes that a real primal division of the subject is the condition of
its possibility.
We have to keep in mind that Lacan is neither an epistemologist nor a specula-
tive language philosopher; his views, rather, are drawn from his clinical and psy-
choanalytic experience. It is into this context of experience that, for a moment,
we have to reintegrate his question about the origin of meaning and thus of subjec-
tivity.
LECTURE 19 301
Lacan begins his observations with the already familiar reflection on the pas-
sive form in which in Saussure's terminology le signifi is given to us. Le signifi:
this is a passive form, in contrast to the other side of the sign which is presented
to us in the active form as le signifiant. Obviously, the speaker receives the mean-
ing of the signs that he uses as a result of the effect of the signifiants, the active
signifiers.
This purely grammatical observation opens up for Lacan a dimension that is
nourished by his analytical experience. It combines, namely, with the further ob-
servation that there is no continual transition from the Being for itself of a mean-
ing and its linguistic (or, as Lacan prefers to say, symbolic) articulation. When
a human being is "thrown" into the world, as Heidegger calls it in a realistic and
unfriendly way, it is at first still without language: the Latin term infans means
both child as well as a being without language. The human child, as we know,
is born too early, since otherwise it would not be able to pass through the narrow
pelvic cavity of the mother. Therefore, it is unique among the mammals where
its dependence on its mother is concerned. A child born too early has thousands
of needs that its own organism cannot satisfy alone through interaction with exter-
nal nature. At the beginning the baby does not articulate these needs, rather it ex-
presses them in an unarticulated manner: it cries and starts moving in a still poorly
coordinated manner; these indications, however, are absolutely understandable
to the mother (or, nowadays, to the parents) at least within certain limits. You
may be familiar with Wilhelm Busch's story about the crying baby that nothing
seemed to calm, and in whose diapers the parents has wrapped a pair of scissors
by mistake. This shows how advantageous it can be to be able to articulate one's
need more clearly than by mere crying. And therefore the baby, the sujet infans,
should be able to explain its need (besoin) to its mother in the form of a demand,
i.e., in articulated form. To this end, and for this reason, it is motivated to learn
the language of the adults: the so-called symbolic order, the order of articulated
and interpreted signs.
But what happens next? The baby or the smaller child that is just learning to
speak has to express its need by means of signifiers in order to be comprehensible
to the mother. The signifier, however, has already traveled from mouth to mouth
(just like the coin travels from hand to hand) before it is able to serve the child
for the signification of its wishes. The signifier expresses, in other words, the
meaning with which the others (for example, the previous generation of speakers)
endowed it, and not that which the child wanted to say. The act the subject wanted
to make use of as a transparent means for bringing out its demand no longer radi-
ates back from its expression the familiar traits of its prelinguistic self-
consciousness-its narcissistic familiarity with the primal intention of the wish;
rather it presents the strange face of an order of the Other. The mere fact of having
to speak distorts the prelinguistic and to this extent imaginary intention in the
medium of linguistic expression and consequently "one receives one's own mes-
302 D LECTURE 19
sage from the other, in inverted form" (Sminaire, II, 68). This inverting move-
ment thus lets the human being who speaks become that through which "id" (a)
speaks, turning its action into passion. The supposedly prior self-possession of
meaning has to turn over its authority-i.e., its auctoritas, its authorship-to the
activity of the signifier, which precisely thereby
has an active function in determining certain effects in which the sig-
nifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that
passion the signified.
This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the
human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man
and through man it speaks (a parle), that his nature is woven by
effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he
becomes the material, and that therefore there resounds in him, beyond
what could be conceived of by a psychology of ideas, the relation of
speech. (, 284)
Grammar, through the passive form "the signified," points to the circumstance
that the symbolically mediated meaning has to be conceived fundamentally as
effect, that is, as posterior effect, and that its stability always only consists in the
limits within which the "incessant sliding" (, 154) of meaning happens to have
come to a halt, that it thus can be retracted by a new "anchoring" (, 154) of mean-
ing on the chain. Since according to Lacan the meaning of a signifying chain is
moreover not determined by means of the lexicon, but rather by the memory, in-
scribed in it, of all unpredictable contexts through which every expression has
already passed in the history of its usages, no expression is ever identical with
the signification attributed to it by the rule of langue (see E [Fr. d.], 503-5). An
unconsciousness of a structural nature disturbs the unequivocality of meaning in
which a subject can abide. (We will return to this in another context.)
At this point we only need to ask how the baby reacts to this. It wanted some-
thing, and it was given a symbol. A symbol represents a thing, but it is not one
itself. The symbol is the ersatz thing par excellence. Whoever symbolically iden-
tifies him/herself with him/herself does not identify him/herself in all the fullness
of his/her Being. Derrida demonstrated this very nicely when he asserted in his
second larger study of Husserl, Speech and Phenomena:
Let us note first that this concept of primordial supplementation not
only implies nonplenitude of presence (or, in Husserl's language, the
nonfulfillment of an intuition); it designates this function of substitutive
supplementation [supplance] in general, the "in the place of (fur
etwas) structure which belongs to every sign in general. . . . What we
would ultimately like to draw attention to is that the for-itself of self-
presence (fiir-sich) traditionally determined in its dative dimension as
phenomenological self-giving, whether reflexive or prereflexivearises
LECTURE 19 303
in the role of supplement as primordial substitution, in the form "in the
place of
1
(fur etwas), that is, as we have seen, in the very operation of
significance in general. The for-itself would be an in-the-place-ofitself
put for itself instead of itself. (SP, 88-89)
If we return to the evolutionary-historical context of the symbolization of the hu-
man being that is learning to speak, we can concretize this general observation
about the nature of the symbolic deferral in the following way: the symbolized
sujet infans does not attain the object of its need in the manner it intended to as
such, but rather over the detour of a representative, a placeholder (Stellvertreter).
The placeholder not only places-strictly speakingthe desired object at a dis-
tance, but also the self of the child that from now on is no longer simply itself,
but rather is for itself; i.e., it refers symbolically to itself.
What Lacan calls le desir reacts to this fundamental deprivation of world and
the self. Le desir, Hegel's Begehren, Freud's Wunsch, is the answer of the human
being to his introduction into the order of mere symbols and representatives of
full realities; it is the reaction to his constant dissatisfaction and his infinite yearn-
ing. The sense of a nonhaving, of a lack, is thus woven into desire, and this lack
appears to be an essential characteristic of the symbolic or intersubjective order
of speech.
We already know one reason for this: the vital need {besoin) is directed toward
real people and real things; the word-the element of the symbolic order-
mediates a need only verbally, only symbolically (as demande): it means, but it
is not the thing itself. (One wants bread and gets stones instead.)
To this extent, according to Lacan, when one speaks one is always somewhat
in the situation of Tantalus who reaches out for foods that recede from his grasp
and who stands in water without being able to quench his thirst. The symbolic
order was conceived as a means for the satisfaction of desire. Instead of this, it
separated the subject of the desire from itself. It now exists on two levels: first,
as the narcissistic moi of the small child that desperately (futilely) identifies with
its mother and uses her breast (insofar as she still offers it these days) as if it were
its own organ; and second, as the speaking being that has delivered itself over
to the order of the Others. This, according to Lacan, is the reason for the decen-
tering or division of the subject that we have already discussed.
Without digressing too much, I would like to characterize more precisely the
ground on the basis of which the symbolic order is experienced as profoundly
defective. Without losing sight of the psychoanalytic experience of the mother-
child relation, Lacan presents his evidence primarily in the field of linguistics.
We know, of course, that Lacan, like all neostructuralists, appeals to Saussure's
idea of meaning-producing differentiality. It is the system of differences that, by
delineating one sound from another, endows each one with its meaning that is
different from all the rest.
304 D LECTURE 19
We can see right away how well suited this theorem is for providing semiologi-
cal support for Lacan's psychoanalytic experience. Saussure believes that initially
there is no stable meaning that then avails itself of expressions; rather, he believes
that, on the contrary, the set of available meanings is produced by the set of differ-
ences that subsist among the really existing expressions of the symbolic order.
Lacan works this into the thesis that the still prelinguistic subject must entrust its
unarticulated desires and its wishes, in order to be comprehensible to others, to
the differential (but uniformly different, and thus, on the intersubjective level,
valid) system of language (langue) that is binding for all speakers of a commu-
nity. After this, however, these wishes are divided by the differences of language;
they no longer have a unity. The most painful part is that the original narcissism
of the ego is offended: it learns that not its ego ideal but rather the order of inter-
subjectivity is its truth, and that its "true subject" is not what it thinks about itself,
but what language says about it.
3
Lacan thus interprets the gap that separates word from word and meaning from
meaning as subject, namely, as the unconscious subject. The subject retreats in
order to give way to meaning. To this extent we can say three things about this
subject: first, that it is always absent and unconscious; second, that it is the ground
for the functioning of language and for the reserve of meaning about which we
communicate symbolically; third, it is clear that this condition is somewhat un-
satisfying and that our ego will always be tempted to include the order of the
Other in the imaginary mirror play of its small I (moi), i.e., to regress to that nar-
cissism about which Lacan once said, only apparently paradoxically, that it is "the
supreme narcissism of the Lost Cause" (, 324).
We have now established a basis upon which we can indicate more exactly how
the subjectivity of that which Lacan calls the "true subject" or the "subject of the
unconscious" (sujet de l'inconscient) relates to what he calls the ordre symbolique.
We can characterize the relation of both subjects as follows: the "true subject" is
a nothing that is its mode of Being^that is, as it were, borne and preserved in
Being by the symbolic order. From this mornent on, Lacan continues, this nothing
has subsistence because it is now employed in its function as a component of the
symbolic order; in this function it survives the act of self-cancellation that makes
it into a blank space between the signifiers and thus into something that, compared
to the positivities that it brought into Being, is relatively nonbeing.
The subject only constitutes himself by removing himself from it [the
signifying beat] and essentially decompleting it in order to at once count
himself in it and fulfill in it only a function of lack. . . .
The effect of speech is the cause introduced into the subject.
Through this effect, he is not the cause of himself; he carries within
him the worm of the cause that cleaves him. For his cause is the sig-
nifier without which there would be no subject in the real. But this sub-
LECTURE 19 G 305
ject is what the signifier represents, and it could not signify anything
unless it be for another signifier: to which then the subject who is
listening is reduced.
The subject therefore is not spoken to. Id speaks of him, and it is
there that he apprehends himself, and this all the more necessarily since
before, simply by virtue of the fact that it is addressing him, disappear-
ing as subject under the signifier that he becomes, he was absolutely
nothing. .But this nothing is supported by its advent, now produced by
the appeal made in the Other to the second signifier. (E [Fr. d.], 606-
7, 835)
These two quotations, which, it seems to me, are mutually illuminating despite
the fact that they are taken from two different contexts, are not as enigmatic as
we might think on first reading. In the first passage it is stated that the subject,
as it were, renounces its natural positivity and fullness by subtracting itself from
the totality of everything positive. But this self-retraction does not simply result
in the death of the subject: the subject survives in such a way that the positivities
that are contrasted with one another due to its disappearance can now be read as
signifiers, i.e., as elements of a symbolic order. Even in nature there are intervals
and mirrorings; however, they do not make nature decipherable or intelligible in
the sense of a script or a text, i.e., in the sense of a texture in whose web the sub-
ject has disappeared as subject, only to resurface ex negativo as the meaning of
the signifiers and as meaning by reason of the signifiers.
We can infer from this how we have to determine the mode of Being of the
subject. Compared to the signifiers that step into existence in its stead, the subject
undoubtedly has the status of a non-Being. But it is not simply nothing at all, for
one can say about it that it is the itself not signifying ground for the significance
of the signifiers that have taken its place. The subject is not something that does
not exist at all; rather it is Nothing in the sense of something that abandons itself
for the benefit of something other. And the other for whose benefit the subject
sacrifices itself is the symbolic order. Saussure's famous statement, "in language
there are only differences" can thus now be understood to mean that it is the sub-
ject that, so to speak, disappears in the gaps between what Saussure calls the "full
and positive terms." But it is only because of these gaps that the expressions have
any meaning at all, even if it is not that meaning the narcissistic moi hoped to em-
body in these expressions.
The inference of the second passage cited should now also be clear: at that mo-
ment when the prelinguistic subject is dissolved in the gaps between the expres-
sions, the symbolic order is established as symbolic order (i.e., in its distinctness
both from the order of the real and from that of the imaginary). And the subject
is now, as Lacan puts it (I am paraphrasing his formulation), that which is "repre-
sented" in the play of references between any two signifiers. The subject is no
longer its mirror image, no longer identical with itself, and, thus, no longer what
306 LECTURE 19
it merely thinks it is (but is not); rather, it is that which comes into Dasein in the
play of reference between any two expressions of the symbolic order as their
meaning.
Now we can approach the open question regarding how the true subject is con-
nected to the blinded, the imaginary, or the narcissistic subject. We have to begin
by considering the following: //the narcissistic subject had a serious possibility
of enclosing itself in itself, and thus to remain standing all its life in front of its
mirror image, then there would be no compelling motivation for expelling it from
this sanctum of consciousness and confronting it with the unsettling experience
of the unconscious and the symbolic. But it is the triumph of Lacan's theory that
it is able to show that precisely this isolation of the moi in itself is not successful,
that the imagination cannot exclude the unconscious from its calculations.
In this regard, Lacan, as a psychoanalyst and not as a philosopher, makes the
following observation: why would we so much like to flee from the Other in the
first place? What is behind our wishes for regression, for self-authorship, self-
sufficiency, and adequate self-representation? Why do we dream that we are the
initiators of the meaning of our world? And why do we even have desire? Are
they innate? That would be hard to understand since all desire points to a non-
Being, to a condition of dissatisfaction and of lack that our longing seeks to sup-
plement. Since this is the case, would it be less plausible if someone were to tell
us that we voluntarily chose to be driven by an insatiable longing? No, our wish
for narcissistic circumscription was brought about by the unconscious itself (as
its Utopian, i.e., imaginary, complement), for the unconscious, the Other-this
is the symbolic order marked by lack. It was this order that canceled out our wish
subject; it killed it in the gaps of the differentiations of expressions out of which
the language {langue) of the Other or the Others arose. This order pricked the
wish ego with the thorn of longing that causes prelinguisitic need to exist as desire
from that moment onward: to exjst as the socially mediated and intersubjectively
broken desire that Lacan also ambiguously calls "the desire of the Other."
In Sminaire II, under the chapterheading "Beyond the Imaginary: Introduc-
tion of the Great Other," Lacan gives a particularly impressive depiction of the
effects of being inserted into the symbolic order in which the subject in fact con-
fronts the other subject as an Other subject whose individuality can be reduced
neither to the specular image of the other (lowercase) that I project of it nor to
the grammatical rules that enforce uniformity on all participants in a symbolic or-
der behind their backs, as it were. The truth, the Otherness, and the autonomy
of the Other that I confront in speech {langage) beyond my narcissism, make
themselves recognizable by the fact that I can simultaneously understand the
Other and never entirely understand it.
LECTURE 19 307
I am always aiming for the real subjects, and I must settle for shadows.
The subject is separated from the Others, the real ones, by the wall of
speech [langage].
If the word [la parole] is founded in the existence of the Other, the
real one, speech is fit to refer us to the other objectivity, to the other
with whom we may do what we will, including think that he is an ob-
ject, that is, that he does not know what he is saying. When we use
speech, our relation with the other is always at play in this ambiguity.
In other words, speech is as fit to found us in the Other as to prevent us
radically from understanding the Other. And this is precisely what is at
issue in the analytic experience. (Sminaire, II, 286)
We will encounter once again this criterion that states that I recognize the auton-
omy of the Other by the fact that I never entirely understand it (and this distin-
guishes understanding from speculative knowledge in Hegel's sense) when we
turn to the problem of understanding as such.
At the moment we only have to understand that, and how, Lacan even tracks
down the desire of the Other behind the wish for complete self-identification. Re-
maining within the framework of the foregoing passage, it is the experience of
the wall that is erected between me and the Other that stirs in me the wish to es-
cape from the dismemberment of the differential order of language (langue), or,
in other words, to transform the unovercome manifoldness of language into unity.
In this formulation Lacan was also able to interpret the experience of depen-
dence of the narcissistic wish on the desire of the Other in terms of the failure
of the dialectical model of reflection for self-consciousness. This model assumes
that something that is manifold in itself searches and finds its unity in a mirror
image that is held up to it; in this way the disseminally manifold identifies itself
as One. It is clear that this formulation is nourished by the psychoanalytic ex-
perience, which consists in supplementing the nonwhole of one's own self-
perception so that it becomes that unity that I perceive either my own mirror im-
age or the object of my love to be: the dismembered body thus gains the illusion,
as Lacan says, of being something integral.
But the shadow of a third element that was repressed by reflection extends into
this dual relation (the moi as many and the moi as one). This third element is the
primally repressed in Freud's sense: the unappeasable lack that is the basis of the
wish for reflective self-identification, a lack that is responsible in the first place
for producing the vision of the coincidence of the manifold with itself as One,
and which survives as desire for narcissistic identification with the other (with a
lowercase o). To desire the other of oneself (the mother, for example, in the ana-
lytical experience) means to know already that the mirror image of reflection, in
which one means the other as itself, does not really allow the coincidence with
it to be successful: therefore, the subject mirroring itself interprets its desire as
an essential "lack" (Fehl) of the loved object (in Lacan's theory as the phallus: that
308 LECTURE 19
which the mother lacks ifehit) and which she, too, desires). This "lack," however,
is at the same time the condition of possibility of the desire for identity; for only
beyond a lack, a nothing, a gap, a blank space, can I mean something as some-
thing (for example, as myself). Nevertheless, something that is meant by me is,
insofar as it has a determined meaning, first of all separated from me, i.e., articu-
lated; it thus exposes itself as an effect of the symbolic order that the mirror play
of the allegedly self-sufficient "dual relation of ego to ego" (E, 138, 172ff.) refers
to a third element that explodes its self-sufficiency. Even in order to become only
illusion, Lacan believes, the imaginary self-entanglement of the moi in its <?ther
would have to appeal to the truth of the repressed, i.e., of the great Other, to
vouch or testify for it.
In other words this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a
guarantor of the truth in which it subsists. (E, 172; cf. 245ff. and Smi-
naire, II, 74-77, 284ff.)
Now we see how our earlier question can be answered. The question was, If the
true I is actually unconscious, how can we know about it? The answer is that we
do not know about it, if "to know" means to bring something before our mind's
eye, to represent something. But we do know about it insofar as in speech we con-
stantly experience a lack that prevents us from endowing a nondifferentiated en-
tity with meaning. Only the dismembered has meaning, and the totality, about
which Hegel said that it alone was the true, exposes itself as an illusion that cannot
possibly be filled with meaning: it exposes itself as the imaginariness of a
prsence--soi. But if the ideaof a complete adequation of the moi with itself
proves to be an illusion ("which sxnot only imaginary but illusory"; Sminaire,
II, 286), we have reason to assume that the subject in principle cannot sound out
its own ground, i.e., that it experiences itself as grounded on an Other that es-
capes its own interiority. Lacan formulates this as the analytical hypothesis that
the moi is by no means the ground of itself, and also not the ground of the meaning
in which it holds on to itself, and which helps it to get a principally incomplete
understanding of itself.
The effect of speech is the cause introduced into the subject. Through
this effect, he is not the cause of himself; he carries within him the
worm of the cause that cleaves him. (E [Fr. d.], 835)
At this point we want to break off our reconstruction of Lacan's theory of the sub-
ject and address to it some critical questions. Even if Lacan indisputably deserves
the honor of being called the pioneer of a certain (as he likes to call it, subversive)
thinking about the mode of Being of subjectivity, he nevertheless is also touched
by a series of certain objections that apply to his successors and that we in part,
and in modified form, already raised against Heidegger.
We saw that Lacan, as opposed to some of his allegedly more radical succs-
LECTURE 19 309
sors, is not prepared to sacrifice the concept of the "subject" in his theory. On the
contrary, we-would not be exaggerating if we said that the problem of the truth
of the subject constitutes the nucleus of his deliberations. Taking up observations
made earlier, we can even add that Lacanwith entirely different motivations,
yet with a comparable resultagrees with Schleiermacher and Sartre that the
"true subject" cannot be thought according to the model of reflection. That ego
that makes its own acquaintance by means of its mirror image (and fails in this)
is rather an epiphenomenon of the true subject. The fact that the I (moi) fails in
its attempt to found itself in the "dual relation of ego to ego" is, for Lacan, not
reason enough for henceforth giving up the notion of subjectivity; rather, he
draws a conclusion that, within the context of neostructuralism, is quite original,
namely, that the reflective ego (moi) cannot be the true subject, but that precisely
because of its failure it calls for the truth of the Subject (with a capital 5). Thus,
for Lacan reflection is not, as for some representatives of analytical philosophy,
a "philosophical pseudoproblem"; rather it is a state of affairs whose subsistence
cannot be denied, but which according to himdoes not subsist by virtue of it-
self, but rather is founded in an Other for which it craves in its Being. That means
both that this Being is merely relative it has the mode of Being of a nant
d'treand that it appeals to something of absolute Being that it itself is not, i.e.,
to the great Other.
The structure of this theory of self-consciousness is, although philosophy is
not the field of application of Lacan's theory, basically homologous with that
which we are familiar with from Schelling and Schleiermacher. There, too, a lack
inscribed in the relation of reflection-in the form of a postulate that is necessary
for thought-bears testimony to something transcendent on which this relation's
merely relative Being is founded. What Sartre calls the "ontological proof of con-
sciousness" remains wholly within the framework of this explanatory model.
With this we have said enough about what Lacan has in common with a tradition
we are already familiar with and on which hermeneutics also is based.
In contradistinction to this tradition, however, it is very difficult to understand
in the case of Lacan what criterion will make it possible in his point of view for
the specular I (moi) to identify with itself at all. To be sure, Lacan tells us that
the specular I (moi) is imaginary. But even imaginations have a Being, and this
(even if relative) Being has to be clarified in a theory that discusses them. This
is particularly true for Lacan's notion of the imaginary I (moi), since it justifies
the recourse to the "true subject" on the basis of the mere relativity of the mode
of Being of the moi.
At this juncture the doubts we brought forward when we were faced with Der-
rida's aporetic deconstruction of the subject also apply to Lacan's theory. His cri-
tique of the reflective model of self-consciousness suddenly transports us to the
realm of the grand Autre to which Lacan attributes the mystical mode of Being
of s'tre, without either explaining or, what is more, justifying the use of the
310 LECTURE 19
reflexive pronoun in this formulation. Either the true subject is absolutely ir-
reflexive, in which case it is impossible to see how one can speak of it as though
it were a subject at all, or else with the formulation s'tre it is in fact ascribed a
problematic familiarity with itself about which Lacan does not say a word. This
is probably of minor consequence for the interests of the psychoanalytic cure. On
the other hand, one also cannot, as soon as one encounters conceptual difficulties,
always protect the work of a theoretical writer of Lacan's stature from criticism
by referring to the pragmatic needs of concrete psychoanalysis, i.e., by immuniz-
ing his work against other ideas. Lacan's writings and seminars are constantly in
such close contact with the philosophical tradition; they evolved to such a great
extent out of his dialogue with philosophy (and not only with Freud) that we have
good reason for not simply breaking off our reflections about the difficulties in
Lacan's deliberations at the point where the author and, even more so, his succes-
sors want to stop them short.
As far as I can see, Lacan, whofor example, in the Four Fundamental Con-
cepts of Psychoanalysis frequently refers to Sartre, did not really grasp the func-
tion of the notion of a prereflective or nonthetic cogito. In the second Sminaire,
for example, he quite clearly cites this distinction without, however, acknowledg-
ing its legitimacy. Let me quote the entire passage.
What gives consciousness its apparently primordial character? The phi-
losopher seems to start ^from an indisputable fact when he starts from
the transparency of consciousness to itself. If there is consciousness of
something, it is not possible, we are told, that this consciousness does
not grasp itself as such. Nothing can be experienced without the subject
being able to grasp itself inside this experience in a sort of immediate
reflection.
In this regard, undoubtedly, philosophers have advanced a few steps
since the decisive step taken by Descartes. The question has been
posed, which remains open, whether the je is immediately grasped in
the field of consciousness. But it has already been possible to say of
Descartes that he had differentiated thetic consciousness from nonthetic
consciousness.
I will go no further into the metaphysical investigation of conscious-
ness. I shall propose to you not a working hypothesis I claim that we
are not dealing with a hypothesisbut a way of having done with it, of
cutting the Gordian knot. For there are problems that need to be solved
that should be dropped without having solved them.
Once again it is a matter of a mirror. (Sminaire, II, 61)
One can cut the Gordian knot, according to Lacan, with the claim that self-
consciousness, be it thetic or nonthetic, is formed in the mirror play of the narcis-
sistic relation: the subject is always shown an objectlike image by means of
which, or through which, it henceforth identifies itself.
LECTURE 19 311
I beg you to consider . . . that consciousness is produced whenever
there is given . . . a surface that is such that it can produce what is
called an image. This is a materialist definition. (65)
This thesis, particularly in its concrete realization (see Sminaire, II, 62-63), is
not very far removed from Adorno's thesis of the "preponderance of the object"
over the subject, which he likewise called "materialistic."
4
Applied to the theory
of self-consciousness, this would be a crass expression for the model of reflec-
tion, according to which the ego would identify itself by means of its own object
without, however, having a criterion at its disposal that enables it to identify the
peculiarity of this object with itself. But we have already seen not only that this
theory culminates in aporias, but that in the instance of self-consciousness it is
not a matter of an act of identification: neither of the self with an image nor of
the self with itself.
Interestingly enough, in Sminaire II one of Lacan's listeners raises an objec-
tion that is wholly in line with this doubt, which Lacan, however, evades.
Lefbvre-Pontalis intervenes in Lacan's lecture with the following comments:
One word, since I think I recognized myself in the anonymous interloc-
utor who had pointed out to you that you were perhaps dodging con-
sciousness in the beginning only to meet up with it all the more surely
at the end. I never said that the cogito was an untouchable truth, and
that the subject could be defined by this experience of total transparency
to oneself. I never said that consciousness exhausted all of subjectivity,
which, incidentally, would be difficult what with phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, but simply that the cogito represented a sort of model
of subjectivity, that is, made very palpable this idea that there must be
someone for whom the word "as" [or "like": comme] has a meaning.
And this you seem to omit. For when you had taken [the example of]
your apologue of the disappearance of men, you were forgetting only
one thing, namely, that men had to come back to grasp the relation be-
tween the reflection and the thing reflected. Otherwise, if one considers
the object in itself and the film recorded by the camera, it is nothing
other than an object. It is not a witness, it is nothing. In the same way,
in the example you take of the numbers said at random, in order for the
subject to realize that the numbers he said at random are not as random
as all that, there must be a phenomenon that you can call what you
wish, but which indeed seems to me to be this consciousness. It is not
simply the reflection of what the other says to it. I do not really see
why it is so important to demolish consciousness if it is to be brought
back in the end. (76)
Lefbvre-Pontalis is referring to the following context: Lacan had followed his
first assertion that even if one assumes a nonthetic consciousness, we are still
dealing with a mirror play with a second one in which he claimed that no con-
312 U LECTURE 19
sciousness independent of this mirror play is necessary in order to take in the
reflex in the mirror.
This, in any case, is what I propose that you admit, so that I may tell
you a little apologue that will guide your reflection.
Suppose that all men have disappeared from the earth. I say men,
given the high value you give to consciousness. This is enough to ask
oneself the question What is left in the mirror? But let us go so far as
to suppose that all living beings have disappeared. All that is left then is
waterfalls and springs lightning and thunder, too. Do the image in the
mirror and the image in the lake still exist?
It is altogether clear that they still exist. And this, for a very simple
reason at the high degree of civilization we have reached, which far
surpasses our illusions about consciousness, we have fabricated devices
that, without any audacity whatsoever, we can imagine to be compli-
cated enough to develop the films themselves, put them away in little
boxes, and place them in the refrigerator. Even though every living be-
ing has disappeared, the camera can nonetheless record the image of the
mountain in the lake, or that of the Caf Flore in the process of crum-
bling in complete solitude. . . .
So! That is what I propose that you consider as essentially a
phenomenon^of consciousness, which will have been perceived by no
ego [moi], whiciMyill have been reflected in no experience of the
ego's every sort of ego and consciousness of the I being absent at this
time.
You will say to me, Just a minute, butterfly! The ego is somewhere,
it is in the camera. No, there is not the shadow of an ego in the cam-
era. But, on the other hand, I will gladly admit that the / has something
to do-not in the camera-with this.
I am explaining to you that it is insofar as he is engaged in a play of
symbols, in a symbolic world, that man is a decentered subject. Well
then, it is with this same play, this same world, that the machine is
constructed. The most complicated machines are made only with words.
(62-63)
Here he takes issue with the idea that, in order to perceive the object in the mirror
as the reflection or the representative of an object, it is not necessary to have a
consciousness/or which the representation takes place. Instead he maintains that
a complicated machine, for example, a Polaroid camera, which could perma-
nently store its copies itself, completely replaces those activities that are usually
attibuted to consciousness. The recording camera is egoless (sans moi), although
it is not without an I (je). But even the I (je) of this strange camera functions as
a centerless entity; although it is not the recording of visual mirror images, it is
nevertheless said about it (and elaborated more fully in what follows) that it is
formed in a homologous way in the differential screen of expressions that refer
LECTURE 19 313
to one another (jeu des symboles), whose totality is the "symbolic world": "The
machine is the structure detached, as it were, from the activity of the subject. The
symbolic world is the world of the machine" (Sminaire, II, 63).
Lacan not only repeats here to be sure, in an amusing formulationthe fa-
miliar view according to which consciousness arises as an effect of the differential
relations between elements of an order (at this point he goes so far as to say: of
objects); he even comes quite close to a crude theory of reflective mirroring, ac-
cording to which the camera can substitute for the function of conscious seeing
or of the eye in all essential respects.
An image means that the energy effects moving out from a given point
in the real imagine them on the order of light, since that is what
figures most manifestly as an image in our minds come to be reflected
at some point on a surface, come to strike the same corresponding
points in space. The surface of a lake can also be replaced by the area
striata of the occipital lobe, for the area striata with its fibrillary layers
is exactly like a mirror. (65)
We will encounter once again in Deleuze and Guattari the dream of a subjectless
machine. We can take this as a piece of information about neostructuralism, with-
out denying that Lefbvre-Pontalis touched the sore spot of this vision: there is
nothing intrinsic to the play of visual reflections that would indicate that the mir-
ror images that are sent back and forth are for themselves what they actually are.
Even a photographic record does not change anything where this is concerned.
The essential difference between an eye and a camera is the trivial one that the
eye is an organ and is self-conscious, whereas the camera does not record what
it records for itself. Consciousness and self-consciousness cannot be reduced to
that without which they certainly would never come into being, through which
alone, however, they also cannot be explained. The famous neurophysiologist
John C. Eccles recently emphasized this distinction very clearly when he desig-
nated consciousness as "a. form of Being which is grounded in itself" that actively
"intervenes by means of interpretation and control" in the processes of the neuro-
logical apparatus, to which, however, it cannot be reduced.
5
Eccles undoubtedly
would also underscore Lefbvre-Pontalis's remark that the "relationship between
the reflection and the thing reflected" requires a witness for which it exists, or,
more precisely, for which it exists as reflection. And that applies as well, as
Lefbvre-Pontalis further emphasizes, for the differential play of elements in a
symbolic order: it is perhaps a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the
constitution of consciousness ("it is not simply the reflection of what the other says
to it") that it be inserted in this order and be addressed with expressions taken
from its stock. All attempts to derive consciousness from whatever relation be-
tween elements, no matter how it is constituted, are philosophically out of the
question insofar as they always already presuppose consciousness. This is also
J 14U Lh t i UKt IV
correctly emphasized by Lefbvre-Pontalis when he says that one cannot possibly
first want to destroy consciousness, only in order to reintroduce it later. The
demolition of consciousness can result in many things, but it cannot generate con-
sciousness, just as nothing comes out of nothing. If, however, in a circular man-
ner one already presupposes consciousness, it becomes meaningless to talk about
a derivation of this phenomenon. Any conclusion to the effect that there can be
consciousness only when there is then finally already consciousness is purely tau-
tological.
It is disappointing that Lacan's observations on the mode of Being of con-
sciousness supply us with such insufficient information. For even if we do not
overlook that Lacan is primarily interested in reinterpreting consciousness as a
function of the misapprehension of the unconscious, still the misapprehending
consciousness must in any case nevertheless be a consciousness. But according
to what Lacan tells us in the Sminaire about the moi in Freud's theory, we have
to fear that he does not even provide us with any evidence for this; for in order
to be misapprehension, consciousness would first of all have to be consciousness.
However, the machine about which Lacan speaks misapprehends neither itself
nor the world>since it is not capable of apprehending anything at all.
Lecture 20
Up to this point I have concerned myself very little with the chronology of the
texts and ideas presented to us by neostructuralism that deal with the problem of
subjectivity, and I intend to continue to let myself be guided by facts that are perti-
nent to the subject matters at hand. If I were to approach the matter differently,
i.e., historically, the thoughts about Lacan that I presented to you in the last lec-
ture would have had to take a place at the very beginning of our series of lectures;
for the seminar on the ego (moi) in Freud's theory was given in the winter semes-
ter of 1954-55, i.e., at a time in which what I have called classical structuralism
was still a dominant force in all of Paris, a force, to be sure, that was yet over-
shadowed by existentialism.
My goal has been to demonstrate that the enterprise of "deconstruction," ac-
cording to its own intent and to the extent that it understands itself correctly, does
not overlap with that of destruction. "Destruction" means demolition, reduction,
bringing to the ground (zu Grunde richten); "deconstruction," on the other hand,
means tearing down to the foundation the walls on which a tradition of thought
is erected (and sometimes even taking apart the foundations themselves), so that
a new and more convincing thoughtor even the same thought in a more convinc-
ing formcan be reerected on the same or on different foundations. This recon-
structive intent is expressed by the inserted "con," which distinguishes decon-
struction from simple destruction. We recall that Derrida explains his newly
coined term in approximately this way.
And Lacan, too, as we just saw, by no means intends to show that the problem
of subjectivity is only a "philosophical pseudoproblem," as the analytical philoso-
315
316 D LECTURE 20
phers put it, following the theoreticians of the Vienna Circle; his aim is, rather,
to make a particular and influential philosophical tradition aware (or maybe only
remind it) that the "true subject" (le sujet vritable) cannot be found where the
philosophy of consciousness, the theory of knowledge, and egopsychology com-
monly look for it, namely, in the mirror play of reflection. He claims, rather, that
it can be found "where id speaks" ("l o qaparle")'. "a subject in the subject, tran-
scendent to the subject, poses to the philosopher since the science of dreams its
question" ([Fr. d.], 437). This question, which is explicitly directed at philoso-
phers, has the therapeutic effect of deconstructing the idea of a self-sufficient ego
(moi) that mirrors itself in itself; i.e., it takes it apart and reconstructs it in a new
and different way on new foundations, namely, on the basis of a theory of the ab-
solute dependence of reflection on something prior to it that is not in itself reflec-
tive. If we recall what we said earlier about Schleiermacher's founding of her-
meneutics in an absolute awareness of dependence, we will be able to agree with
the assertion that Lacan's theory of the subject takes up in its own way one of the
most profound impulses of the critique of idealism supplied from within idealism
itself.
iLacan, to be sure, does this is a form whose concrete realization does not seem
satisfactory to us. Let us recall once again our main objection: while critically
questioning the subject of reflection by demanding another subject that is not con-
ceived according to the model of reflection, Lacan basically, however, does not
have at his disposal any alternative to the reflective model of self-consciousness.
Therefore, it is true of his sujet vritable either that it is unfamiliar with itselfa
completely unarticulated darkness-or that it contains in itself a kind of reflection.
In the first case, one would not be able to speak of a subject; in the latter case,
one could not speak of an alternative to the moi. Lacan, in fact, seizes on the meta-
phor of the subjectless machine in which reflections are recorded that, however,
are no longer somebody's reflections: relations between states of affairs without
a subject whose relations they are. Thus Lacan's critique of the model of subjec-
tivity as reflection culminates in a model of reflexivity without a subject. That
would be either the proverbial night in which all cats are gray, or a recording ma-
chine whose records would never be audible to anybody. Thus the deconstructive
aim is transformed against its own will into a destructive one, into a denial of the
subsistence of the phenomenon it set out to explain.
This criticism, however, applies in a much stronger form to some of
Lacan's should I say "critics," or "successors?'
1
than it does to Lacan himself.
Since this is the case, it seems to me appropriate to have emphasized a conse-
quence that in Lacan is always only a tendency (and, to be sure, an unintended
tendency). I am thinking here of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, the authors
of the two-volume work Capitalisme et schizophrnie which appeared in 1972
and in 1980, the first volume entitled L'Anti-Oedipe, and the second Mille
Plateaux.
1
In both volumes, whose consciously dadaist and carnivalesque style
LECTURE 20 D 317
more or less achieves the provocation it aims to evoke, the notion of the subject-
less machine stands in the foreground. Let me try to characterize this notion in
the course of a brief examination of the basic ideas presented primarily in Anti-
Oedipus although the two authors would certainly be more than a little surprised
to see that anyone would like to attend to thoughts that are so unstable, fluid, or
imprecise that the mere attempt to get a fix on them seems absurd, or at the very
least, comical.
For precisely this reason (the familiar difficulty of nailing a pudding to the
wall, or, let's say, in anticipation of our text, of studying a "desiring-machine"
[or a "rhizome"] with regard to one aspect), we cannot approach the problematics
of the subject in Anti-Oedipus directly, but only by way of a detour through a
characterization of the entire book. We can never really come close to the prob-
lem in this way; still, a kind of symptomatological reading can bring us forward.
What is of the greatest interest to us about Anti-Oedipus is that it is a symptom
and, indeed, a particularly glaring one, which, due to the resonance it found espe-
cially in the younger generation, has shown us that one cannot simply shrug one's
shoulders or laugh and return to the normal academic agenda. To the extent that
Anti-Oedipus is no less than representative for a thoroughly alarming and rapidly
spreading "discontent" in the contemporary condition of our souls and our cul-
ture, it must be taken seriously and analyzed as the symptom of a crisis. This does
not mean that we have to overestimate the phenomenon. For the present, the
effect of the "new thinking" of these two authors can primarily be sensed in the
agitation of those it most directly challenged (e.g., orthodox Freudians or Laca-
nians), or in the whisperings of fan clubs or sectlike groups on the margins of
the academic scene; and very little seems to indicate that anyone in France or in
Germany who is professionally (or out of interest) engaged in philosophy and/or
psychoanalysis would not shake his or her head when he or she hears Foucault's
fanfare for Deleuze.
A fulguration has been produced that will bear the name of Deleuze: a
new thought is possible; thought is newly possible. It is not to come,
promised by the most distant of new beginnings. It is here, in the texts
of Deleuze, leaping, dancing before us, among us . . . one day, per-
haps, the age will be Deleuzian.
We are still awaiting this dawn of a new thinking, although, as we said earlier,
there are some excited fans who claim already to have seen the new light-partly
with concern, partly with hope. But can one deny that the spirit of the times has
taken the wind out of the sails of academic philosophy, that one after the other
phenomenology, existentialism, Critical Theory, and eventually even structural-
ism and analytical philosophy are being relegated to the status of "classics" and
that their last representatives are longing for a bolt out of the blue that will make
thinking possible again?
318 LECTURE 20
It is for this reason that criticism and ridicule of Deleuze (and let's not com-
pletely forget Guattari) are one and the same thing ; and even if such criticism and
ridicule should have the effect of diverting our attention from the legitimation
crises of academic philosophy, we must still first of all seriously accept the
as evermiscarried challenge of Anti-Oedipus and even take it seriously as a
challengeto the extent that it is not asking too much to do this.
The text begins with a torrent of sentences that on their own would already
have sufficed to attract attention. (I fear that, at the same time, it has the result
of diverting our attention away from the reading. But I will let you judge for
yourself.)
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times
in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a
mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines real ones,
not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being
driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connec-
tions. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the
one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine
that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth
of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is un-
certain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a
talking-machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are
all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine,
an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schre-
ber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it
works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is
capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced:
the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors. (AO, 1-2)
This is how it begins, and it continues (or better: flows) on in this style for
hundreds of pages. What breaks loose here is the vision of a total functioning that
occasionally discharges itself in primal screams of conditionless affirmation and
adaptation. Affirmation of what, adaptation to what? We will see that this ques-
tion is irrelevant, for the flow has no aim or meaning whatsoever. Just as in the
fourth sentence of the book the nominalization of the id is rejected ("What a mis-
take to have ever said the id"), so the teleological directedness and intentionality
of the authorless activity that is how the flowing production is presented to us
is also denied (AO, 5). Movement occurs without being the movement of some-
thing (i.e., the movement of a substrate or a subject), and, in a strangely sterile
reflexivity, it is only directed at itself;
2
that is what constitutes its machinelike as-
pect (and it is compared to Freud's "primary process").
The rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing
onto the product, is a characteristic of desiring-machines or of primary
LECTURE 20 D 319
production: the production of production . . . which, as we shall see,
is what even the very young child does. (7)
This subjectless and aimless production, which, however, is filled to overflowing
with and by itself, is most similar, perhaps, to Nietzsche's "life," conceived as
the unity of the will to life preservation and the will to life intensification. Deleuze
treated this subject in this book on Nietzsche, adding that the nucleus of the "will
to power" is the power of "affirmation"of unreserved affirmation of being-there
(Daseienden), This love of the Zarathustra-Dionysian "unlimited saying of Yea
and Amen" permeates the entire Anti-Oedipus, and even the Social Darwinist
elitist interpretation of "eternal return" as the Yea to "breeding, to selection" is
not missing: a consequence that was at least unwelcome to those who wanted to
redeem Nietzsche from the charge of being a predecessor of National Socialism
and even an ally of Social Darwinism.
3
1 know that this is a broad and very ticklish
field, and predecessorship is a particularly questionable concept, because in a cer-
tain sense all those who are born earlier are "predecessors" and "precursors" of
those who are born later; but there are no grounds for accusing them of complicity
simply on this basis alone. At any rate, let's hold on to the structural trait connect-
ing vitalism and Social Darwinism, which consists in the fact of affirming not a
rationally founded aim that is attributed to a subject capable of making decisions,
but rather the naked, subjectless, and aimless hypostasis "life." Whoever affirms
"life" has to affirm it in all its manifestations. If the racial doctrine and the doctrine
that affirms the right of those who are better adapted (better adapted to what?)
has to be considered to be one possibility among others for describing "life," then
how are we to reject them?
The unusual and unfamiliar aspect of the neovitalism of the Anti-Oedipus, as
opposed to the old well-known vitalism, is that it is accompanied by a new affec-
tion for the thought of the machine (for which the pseudoromantic vitalism at the
close of the nineteenth century had no sympathies whatsoever). For this neovital-
ism, everything becomes a machine: sky-machines, star-machines, the rainbow-
machine, and the mountain-machine- something moans and sighs and rattles and
"lives" in the body of the universe in which the delimited body of the (subjectless)
vital producer expands. In this cosmic idyll, do we simply have to put up with
the "continual whirr of machines" (2), just as we put up with the noise of autos
outside our windows? It's inevitable. "One, two / nothing is bad, / everything will
workout, / everything is possible . . ." (lyrics of a punk song by Nina Hagen).
Even what Max Scheler called "cosmovital empathy"
4
becomes, for the two
authors of Anti-Oedipus, "a chlorophyll- or photosynthesis-machine, or at least
[the desire to] slip his body into such machines as one part among the others" (2).
But if the odd choice of words seems to announce a fashionable rapture, one
still cannot say that a topic is addressed that has hitherto been neglected or was
previously unheard of. Nietzsche's Homo natura, as well as Schelling's and
320 D LECTURE 20
Feuerbach's "essential unity of the human being and nature," are always in the
background (see AO, 2ff,). Some formulations even remind one of the magical
analogies of romantic nature philosophy-if they were only a little less insipid.
In both instances the human being becomes a source for analogies from which
the kinship of all cosmological ideas arises; even stars and animals are given over
to the human being to protect ("the being who is in intimate contact with the pro-
found life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars
and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-
machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole:
the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe"; 4). Heidegger's old-
fashioned image of the human being as the "shepherd of Being" is futuristically
recast under the auspices of the industrial age,
5
turned into the image of the eter-
nal custodian of the machines of the universe (AO, 4); indeed the human being
is ever their "mechanic" (338, passim).
If the human being were the "organizer" of meaning, then we would come into
even greater proximity to Lorenz Oken's idea of the unity of the human being and
nature, and particularly to his idea of the universal unity of production of nature.
Characteristic of Oken's system as well is the universal analogy, the transmutabil-
ity of realms of Being, the mysticism of the number (in his case it is the number
five; in the case of Deleuze and Guattari it is the number three), and the idea that
the individual creature exists only as a "partial organism" (particular organ) in the
"flowing universe of primal life." Hegel already reproached Oken and his re-
proach would also apply in more pointed form to the authors of Anti-Oedipus
asserting that in this case a "mostly empty formalism [is at work], an immature
brew of half-understood concepts, flat and mostly even silly ideas, and a lack of
knowledge of Philosophy itself as well as of the sciences in general";
6
or even
calling Oken's work "most crude empiricism with the formalism of materials and
poles, embellished with unreasonable analogies and drunken aperus."
7
All of
these criticisms would be even more valid for the authors of Anti-Oedipus.
What possible motivation could there be for such a totalization of mechanistic
thinking? One motivation is certainly that the machine simply "functions" (a fa-
vorite term of those who "say Yea and Amen" to that which is), and certainly an-
other reason is that it is less problematic to experience "pleasure" (to bring into
play another favorite concept of these authors) in the machine's dismemberment,
its partialization, and its reassembly, than one could expect in the case of the dis-
memberment of organs and their reattachment. However, they did not consider
the horror of being transported to Frankenstein's laboratory: the reader does not
attend a slaughterfest, but rather a delirious, or, as Hegel pointedly said, drunken
piecing together. Machine parts float about all over (in a figurative language that
tends rather toward catachresis than toward metaphor), and they function only
under the condition that they are screwed onto other parts or unscrewed from
them: conjunctions and incisions abound. The mouth of the machine, for exam-
LECTURE 20 3 321
pie, is attached to the breast-machine (a "source-machine," as we have already
seen, is hooked up to an "organ-machine"). Put in a pseudomathematical way, this
means that "desiring-machines are binary machines, obeying a binary law or set
of rules governing associations: one machine is always coupled with another" (5).
But it is a matter of a binarism ad infinitum: through all this turning of screws
and wheels a vitality floods, flows, presses, rages, and raves; a sort of cosmic
electricity whose task it is to resist the entropy of the universe, the "antiproduc-
tion" and the "body without organs": this vitality is the wish, the Freudian libido,
Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's will to power and will to life, Lacan's desire. The
will to life makes things flow, flows itself, and separates the united.
Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a
flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by par-
tial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn
produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects. (5-6)
One is hesitant to believe it at first; nonetheless, something remarkable is making
itself known. For Deleuze and Guattari it is clear that the machine parts-as par-
tial objects (in the terminology of Melanie Klein) do not demand any assignment
to particular personal bearers. The entities of production are dissoluble and can
be arbitrarily recombined; they escape the identity of the compulsion for refer-
ence: for example, the compulsion for reference to the breast of the mother
Amalie Freud, the spouse of Jacob Freud, in short; they resist the compulsion
for reference to the "source-machine" of any armored subject whatsoever that
might coincide with itself and which would be unequivocally distinguished from
all other subjects.
The act that relates the flows of desire to persons is thus redirected: the result
of a jam in the mechanism of the machines that produce the "body without organs"
as the space for the inscription of their distinctions (8, 75fT.). The unconscious
as such is itself parentless and impersonal (49). It refers to partial objects with
which it forms units of production and if desiredthen dissolves again.
Partial objects are not representations of parental figures or of the basic
patterns of family relations; they are parts of desiring-machines, having
to do with a process and with relations of production that are both irre-
ducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedi-
pal figure. (46)
Desiring-production is thus a "molecular force"; it does not prevent particles that
have combined together from forming a more attractive synthesis with different
particles at another time. For there is only the process of production, on the one
hand, and the relations of production, on the other. That, at least, is the primal
condition: the world of desire before the Oedipal figure inscribed itself in desire
322 D LECTURE 20
and transformed it into something primally repressed and unconscious. (We want
to take note of the fact that desire thus is natura sua not unconscious.)
But how does that transformation of the "desire to desire" (Wunsch zu wiin-
schen) into a craving {Begehren) for persons actually occur? How does the
productive flow come under the law of the triangulation familiale (75f.) (which
one at the same time has to imagine as a strangulation, if only because of the
rhyme)? By the fact that desire, Deleuze and Guattari answer, is displaced from
the level of pure mechanical functioning to the level of signifying (Lacan's intru-
sion du signifiant). Instead of producing realities and remaining with its craving
itself within the really existing "identity of the human being with nature," it now
produces only images, shadows, and representations (51ff.): it realizes itself in-
directly, symbolically; it dies as desire and is reincarnated as (a chain of) signi-
fication. (Apparently every representation presupposes a prior presence in which
desire, prior to all representation and personalization, is familiar with itself: in
his Logique du sens Deleuze had already paid tribute to this theorem as Sartre's
"decisive" discovery [LS, 120, 124], without, to be sure, subscribing to his
characterization of it as an impersonal consciousness.)
8
Significations are undoubtedly no natural result of "savage desire," i.e., of the
primordial unity of production between the human being and nature. They are
formed, as (not for the first time) was shown by Ferdinand de Saussure, in the
play of differential relations among material substrates of expression (signifiers),
each of them acquiring its identity and thus its determined significance by virtue
of the fact that it is unequivocally distinguished from all other expressive sub-
strates. Saussure conceded that he was thinking of the theory of exchange value
in political economy when he developed this thought
9
(in fact, the comparison of
the semiotic sign to money was already a commonplace in Humboldt's time), and
Deleuze and Guattari remember this when they relate the "codification" of
desirethe condition for its Oedipalization with the rise of capitalist commodity
production.
The idea in itself is not particularly original. Others have presented it with bet-
ter arguments and in more depth (of course, the authors reject all talk of "depth").
But lack of originality and a drunken argumentative fluctuation between promises
that are never cashed in and superfluous retractions still do not completely wipe
out a thought that wants to express itself. The advantage of every brand of eclecti-
cism is that something useful, and even sometimes remarkable, is always caught
in its net and, according to the law of coincidence, can even enter into interesting
relations. To be sure, one has to deconstruct the ideas, i.e., take them out of their
disorder and put them into a new order, which means reformulating them into
a communicating discourse.
As far as the idea of representation is concerned to begin with this issue
Schopenhauer's (and Nietzsche's) predecessorship is evident. For Schopenhauer
the "in-itself" (An-sich), the desire that holds the world together from within, ex-
LECTURE 20 U 323
ists in two manifestations: as will and as representation (repraesentatio). One
knows this even if one is only familiar with the title of his major work. Only the
will is real, of course; representation makes the will ideal and unreal. It trans-
forms the wild drive for life, which makes stones into crystals, which drives the
sap into buds and vines, and which pumps the streams of urges through the bodies
of animals, into a panopticon of representations whose gruesomeness is made
bearable only by the aesthetic distancing that art provides. Except for the pes-
simistic tone, the same is the case for Deleuze and Guattari: "The objective being
of desire is the Real in and of itself
1
(26-27). And (I am putting the quotation to-
gether out of two passages that supplement each other):
The order of desire is the order of production', all production is at once
desiring-production and social production. . . . For a structural unity
is imposed on the desiring-machines that joins them together in a molar
aggregate. (296, 306)
This subjugation of the wild flow of production to the structuring order of por-
trayal, of representation, simultaneously produces the fiction of the unconscious;
for the desiring force of production, which is repressed and transformed by the
order of representation, lives on as something repressed: it simultaneously both
continues to be effective and is excluded from consciousness as something it
lacks.
In reality, social production becomes alienated in allegedly autonomous
beliefs at the same time that desiring-production becomes enticed into
allegedly unconscious representations. . . . But production is not
thereby suppressed, it continues to rumble, to throb beneath the
representative agency (instance reprsentative) that suffocates it, and
that it in return can make resonate to the breaking point. . . . Now
the same is true of both desiring-production and social production: ev-
ery time that production, rather than being apprehended in its original-
ity, in its reality, becomes reduced (rabattue) in this manner to
representational space, it can no longer have value except by its own
absence, and it appears as a lack within this space. . . . once desiring-
production has spread out in the space of a representation that allows it
to go on living only as an absence and a lack unto itself. (296, 306)
In other words, as opposed to Lacan and Derrida, there is a primal positive for
Deleuze and Guattari, namely, desire, which only subsequently gets caught up
in the net of the symbolic order and dissociates itself there. For those who assume
the standpoint of the order of representation, desiring-production exists only as
something that is lacking in the order itself. To be more precise, desiring-
production exists for them only as the sacrifice desire has to make in order to be-
come symbol or representation (of craving). The unconscious is thus nothing
originary, but rather the effect of a banishment of desire from consciousness. The
324 D LECTURE 20
fact that it appears in this order as a lack does not, however, mean that it is a lack
in itself; rather it is the order that breaks down and hollows out the fullness of
its positivity. The becoming-sign of desire is the fall from paradise, desire's denial
of itself. The will becomes a mere copy and image (Ab- unci Nachbild); it becomes
representation, shadow, illusion: the re-presentation of a primal present.
10
But that is still quite mildly put, and to the ears of the authors it must sound
like a scornful euphemism. Like Nietzsche, they overstress the metaphor of
inscription and incision to the point that we find ourselves transported to Kafka's
penal colony or similar places of torture: the symbolization of desire-Nietzsche's
"mnmotechnique," translated into French as codage, enregistrement, or sym-
bolisation occurs as a cut in and dissection of the flesh of the will to life. The
differentiality of language cuts up and tears up the "full body" of a wildness that
dreams again of Wordsworth's "Never-never land." Style, stylo, stylet: three
designations for one and the same instrument of torture. Behind this stands (be-
ginning with Nietzsche) "grammar." Its system is
the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on
them, belaboring them. That is what cruelty means. . . . It makes
men or their organs into parts and wheels of the social machine. The
sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs
that plant their flags in bodies. (AO, 145)
The transformation into a machine, of course, is acceptable (as long as it func-
tions and "nothing is bad"). It is merely the wrong machine that here poses as the
agency of flows of desire: a totally alienated machine, i.e., culture. (Yet it is very
difficult to imagine how one should conceive "alienation" in a system of mere
mechanical functioning I, at least, cannot conceive of it.)
At any rate, many people from the older generation are familiar with this sort
of critique of culture from books that have been successfully suppressed in Ger-
many: Spengler and the representatives of the "conservative revolution" flirted
with descriptions of the history of mankind as a process of decay, first the decay
of archaic savageness, then of myth, and finally of culture. The zero grade is the
totalitarian civilization that the myth of blood, violence, and honor-it is Rosen-
berg's Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts
11
is supposed to revert in a
revolutionary manner to the Archaic. The most important thing is that the process
of culturalization-already in Spengler-is appreciated only when compared to
the process of civilization: on the scale that measures decay, it stands pretty close
to the bottom, and certain followers of Nietzsche-Gentile, for exampledid not,
for their part, pass up the opportunity to point out the violent act of "mnemotech-
nical insciption inherent in it." Let's not forget (in spite of Theweleit) that fascism
also knows (and loves) its streams and flows, for example, that "brown flood" (the
SA) which, according to Rohm's words of 1933, will "overflow the gray rock [of
the military]." In 1947 Sartre, in "What Is Literature?", called opting for the im-
LECTURE 20 325
mediate the source of all violence: "Our first duty as a writer is . . . to re-
establish language in its dignity. After all, we think with words. We would have
to be quite vain to believe that we are concealing ineffable beauties which the
word is unworthy of expressing. And then, I distrust the incommunicable; it is
the source of all violence."
12
I will go as far as to assert that the phantasm of the savage flow of craving and
of its discursive subdual is the foundation of the minimal consensus of the coun-
terenlightenment, which, as we know, was by no means procapitalist and friendly
to the bourgeoisie (Thomas Mann, in his Doctor Faustus, called nazism "the com-
pletely unbourgeois adventure").
13
This applies to Nietzsche himself, as well as
to Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Edgar Jung, Heidegger, Alfred Rosenberg,
Charles Maurras, or the so-called Nouvelle Philosophie, which finds violence in
any claim to explanation and symbolic representation of phenomena in terms of
the unity of one perspective, and which cannot be clearly distinguished from the
New Right (Nouvelle Droite).
This also applies to Deleuze and Guattari. In a (sometimes stimulating)
speculative jaunt through the history of the (decay of the) human species, they
distinguish three stages in which the knife of writing cuts into the flesh of desire
in order to culminate in the castration of Oedipus. At the beginning (as in Rous-
seau), there are the savage societies; they constitute themselves by means of codes
of kinship relations that make the individual immediately into the representative
of the social. To be sure, by means of mere codification they repress with struc-
tural necessity the representative of the savage wish. The "savage territorial ma-
chine" (which gets its name from its "territorialization" of the boundless, "deter-
ritorialized" streams of archaic desiring-production, dividing it into estates and
tracts, parcels and distinctive property) gives way over the course of history to
the despotic state in which "the repressive representation"the "despotic
signifier" establishes its terrorist regime. Precisely how it accomplishes this re-
mains, as usual, obscure. At any rate, the founders of states a "herd of blonde
beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters" (Nietzsche, Works, XIII, 103;
see also 84ff.)
14
-overrun the savage societies in order to pounce "with terrible
claws on a population; in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet
formless, as yet nomad" (Works, XIII, 103) ("which, organized for war and with
the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace per-
haps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless"; AO, 192). The chain
of horrors evolves in the following order: the Greek corporate state, Christianity,
feudalism, democratic and bourgeois humanism, the industrial society, capital-
ism, and socialism: "The earth becomes a madhouse" (192).
In order for it to come to this, the play of representations has to consent to its
last and devastating shifting: accomplished solely through the agency of the
reprsent dplac, an agency that intensifies the other forms of re-presenting
326 D LECTURE 20
repression of the savage craving into extremes (its two predecessors are "the re-
pressed representative" and "the repressing representation"; 166).
This is a fairly complicated story, but we have to follow its development, since
only at the end do we encounter Oedipus, the guardian and patron of the allegedly
universal structure of ego-like centered subjectivity that identifies itself socially
by subordinating itself to the morality of the symbolic father, the superego. Oedi-
pus is, therefore, not, as one might have thought, the resulting final product of
"grammar" and the compulsions for identification and differentiation inscribed
into it (which place persons, subjects, and owners in the stead of the apersonal
parts of desiring-machines).
For Oedipus to be occupied, it is not enough that it be a limit or a dis-
placed represented in the system of representation; it must migrate to
the heart of this system and itself come to occupy the position of the
representative of desire. (177)
This condition is supposed to be fulfilled in capitalism.
With this we have finally arrived at the point where the analogy between the
semiological value theory of language and the exchange-value economy of
capitalism can be made productive. And this is indeed what happens (240ff.). Ac-
cording to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism, deceptively enough, is not a system
of codification at all. Essential to it is the permanent "decoding" of codes, the "de-
territorialization" of territories. Its streams of money, feces, and commodities
know no fixed or definitive "limits." They share this with Saussure's (and even
more so with Hjelmslev's) "language system," whose "values" (i.e., differentially
determined and hollowed-out units) similarly float around their sign hulls (i.e.,
they "float" as do currencies) over the course of an infinite number of speech ap-
plications in order to continually differentiate and identify themselves anew on
new and enlarged "speech lattices." With Georges Bataille we could speak of the
"unlimiting of economy" that was accomplished in structuralism. Its effect is that
codification is replaced by an "axiomatic."
15
This is a strange terminological pro-
posal, for under an "axiomatic" one usually understands a value system or system
of principles (which is not subjected to the free market of the exchange of signs)
such as is appropriate, for example, to mythical or religious epochs, something
that was destroyed, according to Max Weber, by capitalistic rationalism. Be that
as it may, the authors designate (if I have counted correctly) five criteria for the
distinction of axioms from the code of States. First, they believe that code rela-
tions presuppose inequalities (Althusserian "dominancies") between the elements
(for example, between the nobility and the serfs). Second, the free market, on
the other hand, introduces a purely logical (or economic) differentiality between
the exchange values, and it thereby introduces the law of equivalence into the
realm of communication. In this manner the signs of power cease completely to
be what they were from the standpoint of the code: they become "directly eco-
LECTURE 20 327
nomic coefficients" without duplicating themselves and (by means of representa-
tion) referring to noneconomic factors ("they become coefficients that are directly
economic instead of being doubles to the economic signs of desire and expressing
for their part noneconomic factors determined as dominant"; 249). Third, it is es-
sential to the potency of capital that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it further
extend any limit by introducing new axioms: what it decodes or deterritorializcs
with one hand, for example, religious and ethical obligations, it axiomatizes and
reterritorializes with the other (257). Fourth, the capitalist axiomatic can no
longer be portrayed as a gruesome instrument of inscription: everything takes
place under the appearance of complete nonviolence. Everything seems to be the
same as everything else; there are no preferences. Already Marx's Capital had
emphasized this universalizing potential of unfettered commodity production that
dissolves prejudices, breaks through national boundaries, and expands produc-
tive forces and necessities ad infinitum. It is based on the fact that capital from
now on only marks quantities and no longer pays any attention to qualities: the
value of a person loses its aura, the person becomes a "private person" whose
identity is not inscribed by God or humanist dignity as an inalienable and intrinsic
characteristic but rather is produced by means of the free play of unfettered rela-
tions of salability {Ausserlichkeitsbeziehungen)\ the person is what it possesses,
and it is "different from all others." This is both the ultimate and the only thing
it has in common with other individuals. And fifth, capitalism has the tendency
to replace the social machine with technical machines. It is no longer the kinship
code or the feudal "filiation" that determines the "value" of a human being (as an
element in the system), but rather the machine in the nonfigurative sense. One
could say that capitalismas opposed to those societies described by Lvi-
Straussmakes intersubjective relations into wholly economic relations. For
Deleuze and Guattari, this is the reason for the "privatization of the family" (263).
In the capitalist stage of the fall from savagery, the family no longer serves eco-
nomic reproduction; rather it migrates to a place outside it. The processes of so-
cialization that are freed from kinship and filiation now run only by means of the
alienated form of economic reproduction; the human being becomes the product
of its product that confronts him/her as an independent thing and teaches him/her
about its value: "function derived from the flow of capital" (264).
We are by and large familiar with this in a more convincing and intelligent
argumentation from Karl Marx. But let's not be unjust: the old patriarch, after
all, did not bother to enlighten us about the genesis of the Oedipal complex. To
speak of enlightenment about it in the case of Deleuze and Guattari would, to be
sure, be somewhat of an exaggeration. But now and againone can only express
it with one of the innumerable catachreses with which this book teems a spark
flies out of the "fecal flows" and even out of the "sunbeams in the ass." Oedipus,
namely, is the final stage of a process of total abstraction in which all (concrete)
relations between human beings are reduced to the final complex of the daddy-
328 LECTURE 20
mommy-me: "the despotic sign inherited by daddy, the residual territoriality as-
sumed by mommy, and the divided, split, castrated ego" (265). The function of
this language game, which is singularly impoverished as opposed to the richness
of filiation, consists in furnishing the abstract private person with his or her last
symbolic territory. Capital is in need of this in order not to undermine itself as
a functioning mechanism, i.e., in order to impose a certain diet, whose nonobser-
vance would be deadly for the mechanism, on its potentially infinite hunger for
decoding.
It is only in the capitalist formation that the Oedipal limit finds itself not
only occupied, but inhabited and lived, in the sense in which the social
images produced by the decoded flows actually fall back on restricted
familial images invested by desire. It is at this point in the Imaginary
that Oedipus is constituted, at the same time as it completes its migra-
tion in the in-depth elements of representation: the displaced repre-
sented has become, as such, the representation of desire. (286-87)
Oedipus is thus not an invention of Freud and of ego psychology; with the couch
it merely gave Oedipus a new home. And it is true that Freud did not want to see
how the familial images, as soon as one takes a close look at them, substantially
dissolve, thereby allowing us to see through to those social images from which
they receive their meaning. If Luther discovered the essence of religion in in-
wardness, Fichte the essence of the mind in absolute subjectivity, Smith and
Ricardo the law of value in the abstract subjective essence of productive activity,
then one can view Freud's historical achievement as the discovery of the abstract
nature of the libido. But in this case he redirected the savage flow of desire-as
if he wanted to excuse himself to the "system" for his discovery - a s "the dirty little
secret" into the pool of the family, the last bastion of the self-assertion of the sub-
ject in its privacy: "In place of the great decoded flows, little streams recoded in
mommy's bed. Interiority in place of a new relationship with the outside" (270).
Although impossible to listen to, this is nevertheless intelligible. We can cer-
tainly safely concede that the rediscovery, or, put more cautiously, the reapplica-
tion of Melanie Klein's theory of partial objects, and the doubts about the trans-
historical validity of Freud's psychology of the family and of personality resulting
from it, can have a liberating effect. They might even be able to provoke the criti-
cal questioning of certain philosophical theories that accept as incontestable that
one must approach this matter beginning with the subject. Perhaps "the subject"
is in fact a historical, that is, an acquired scheme for our self-interpretation, one
that is not grounded in any a priori evidence? One can, indeed, one must reflect
on these questions, and it is within the framework of such reflections, to which
we have granted major significance in our lectures, that we have made an effort
to hear what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about it.
It is all the more unfortunate that the authors supplant what they call the "ter-
LECTURE 20 U 329
rorist daddy-mommy language" with the artificially infantilized pee-pee-kaa-kaa
language (I say "artificially infantilized" in the knowledge that children speak
differently). It is not easy to forget the interruption at the Sartre colloquium at
Cerisy in 1979, at which if was admonished: "Why don't we stop all these horse-
shit games!" One could easily show, if it were worth proving, how even the im-
ages of this language open themselves up to worlds of repression and to the spite-
fully overcompensated denial of pleasure. It is not enough to strip away the
academic veneer (first of all, because Anti-Oedipus is read primarily at universi-
ties); until the barriers of terminological, indeed, of jargonlike opposition are re-
moved, many things will continue to stand in the way of the liberation of desiring-
production, the well-meant Yea in affirmation of the positivity and irreplaceabil-
ity of "life." For the sake of several thought-provoking ideas in Anti-Oedipus, it
is too bad that their "discursive" medium makes them inaccessible to the reader;
for the reader cannot help but get the impression that the light that shines on the
"ass of Judge Schreber" too seldom illuminates the heads of the authors (at best
it heats them up).
But there are more serious objections that can be made. One of them is related
to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of schizophrenia. I will take care to avoid incur-
sions into a matter about which I am not sufficiently informed (although perhaps
not even the authors themselves are). Nevertheless, what Deleuze and Guattari
have to say about schizophrenia is closely connected to their reconstruction of the
genesis of that persistent overestimation of the ego by which even philosophy
especially philosophy has been hard hit. Inasmuch as Anti-Oedipus makes state-
ments about the theory of the subject, we, as philosophers, are directly addressed,
and we can, indeed must, put them to a critical test.
According to the view of the two authors, schizophrenia is a disorder that psy-
choanalysts and entire schools of ego psychology would like to reduce to neuro-
sis; neurosis, however, is an illness that arises out of the incompatibility of savage
desires with the law that demands that an "ego" be formed, i.e., that desires be
made compatible with the imperatives of the symbolic order (of the superego).
Consequently, the cure of psychoanalysis consists in Oedipalizing the "schizo,"
i.e., in making him into a functional bearer of capitalist order. (Were there no
"schizos" in precapitalist times?)
The craving of the schizophrenic, however, is supposed to consist precisely
in breaking through the always only relative limit with which capitalism girds the
schizophrenic's amoeba-like body, thereby carrying forward the innermost mod-
ern spirit that demands the overstepping of limits, curiosity about the world, the
undoing of taboos, and emancipation. The "schizo," who dares to go much further
than audacious trespassers such as Doctor Faustus or the Flying Dutchman, wants
to destroy even this final limit "which causes the flows to travel in a free state on
a desocialized body without organs" (246). (The "body without organs" and the
"socius" are ciphers for the "antiproduction" that anorganically opposes the origi-
330 LECTURE 20
nary desiring-production: the material in which punishment and coding are ac-
complished, closely related to Sartre's pratico-inerte.)
Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism
itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only
functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back
or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative
limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale. (246)
The "schizo" (as the authors call him in comradely fashion) is thus produced by
capitalism; yet although he is only an extension of its innermost tendency (and
thus is completely unsuited to criticize capitalism by means of his craving itself!),
in the long run he produces a "socius" for capitalism whose effect, as opposed to
the tyrant in the family and at home, Oedipus,
16
threatens to destroy the axiomatic
of capitalism. He therefore has to be locked up (confined!) in an insane asylum.
We are already familiar with the basic features of this view from Foucaulfs
archaeology of insanity, on which Deleuze and Guattari also rely. Each genera-
tion, it seems, has to construct its contrastive myths out of the material of its ex-
perience of real suffering in the existing society. Frequently this occurs in the
form of a simple inversion of the dominant axiomatic. In the eighteenth century,
for example, the critique of the legitimation of "world curiosity," and particularly
of imperial colonialism, becomes stronger in the circles of the ascending bour-
geois intelligentsia. The complementary myths of the punished world conquerer
{The Flying Dutchman) and of the "noble savage" arise at the same time.
17
In the
twentieth century, perhaps even since romanticism, these myths seem to have
been replaced by the myth of the good madman, of the "schizo" (think of E. T.
A. Hoffmann's tale about the insane musician Kreisler or Tieck's novella Die
Reisenden)}* If we remain at the level of myth, of the collective imagination of
a class or a group at a certain time, it would be very difficult to contradict Deleuze
and Guattari's diagnosis. As soon as they recruit their examples from literature
(and they do this remarkably often, indeed, they almost never take them from the
sphere of the clinic), they can always plausibly prove that the lunatic who is
banned from society is imagined as the "better person" in the hidden and poetic
dreams of the same society. The "schizo" is the collective suffering subject: the
savior with the crown of thorns, but also the revolutionary par excellence; in
short, he is the representative bearer of all the forbidden desires and archaically
thronging cravings that in their very nature have to be inimical to order, rebel-
lious, and subversive. Each of us can detect this inclination in him/herself. It may
very well be true that, in the sense of the colloquial expression, "capitalism drives
us all crazy."
Nevertheless, we are still permitted to ask the question as to whether one
necessarily has to write about psychosis in the style of psychosis (and not en
posie as Beckett, Kafka, Proust, Lawrence, Artaud, or Blanchot did): that is,
LECTURE 20 U 331
in a style that over large stretches, one cannot read without sharing with Schopen-
hauer the pleasure he experienced when he read Hegel.
19
Even more profound is a doubt of another sort. It concerns the critique of the
analogy between Oedipality and subjectivity. In Anti-Oedipus this analogy is es-
tablished by the idea of introducing the savage flows of desire into the order of
representation. The "inscribed" subject is not the subject of desire but rather the
repressed, displaced, alienated subject that is trained to say I and to obey the code.
This formulation is structurally similar to Lacan's delimitation of the narcissistic
subject from the true subject. The difference is that Deleuze and Guattari want
to understand desire as something nonnegative, or even as pure positivity: the
negativity attributed to it is, according to them, itself already the effect of
Oedipalization and the related fear of castration; and it is these, moreover,
that also make Lacan's sujet vritable conceived as manque tre and pure
lacuneappear unsuited as a means for escaping the I fixation of psychoanalysis.
We cannot treat the posed problem any further here. Instead, we will try to
formulate it as clearly as possible and set it as our task for the next lecture: what
role does the order of representation (abbreviatedly termed "grammar," following
Nietzsche) play in the Oedipalization of the "subject," or, in other words, in the
instance of the becoming-subject of desire?
Lecture 21
If there is any thought that helps to unite Anti-Oedipus into a text, it is, it seems
to me, this one: the savage desire of the production primaire -an expression
coined in analogy to Freud's "primary process"is deprived of its natural im-
mediacy and positivity by being inserted into the order of representation, until
it can only imagine its uncomplicated fullness as something it lacks, as a manque
tre. It is, of course, one characteristic feature of representation among others
that it replaces a Being with an image, a present with a presencing (or, to be more
precise, with a retropresencing). The originary positivity of the thing is thus
partly negated by the symbol. The representative of desire, the linguistic sign,
for example, is no longer desire itself in its Being in itself; rather it is a place-
holder (Stellvertreter) that "supplies" the absence of that to which it refers. How-
ever, in order to be able to accomplish this placeholding, it must subjugate itself
to an order: for example, the linguistic sign must subjugate itself to the order of
language (of grammar). Now grammar, as we know, achieves the determinate-
ness of its elements only by contrasting them with each other. The identity of the
signs, therefore, is grounded, as the condition of its possibility, on the destruction
of the unity of the signified: to designate something always already means to in-
corporate it into a differentiated, a dismembered world. To designate a world by
means of a collection of differentiated signs also means to take the loss of the unity
of the signified as a part of the bargain. The unity of the signified is replaced by
the unity of the signifying structure itself, behind which, itself absent, the shadow
of the unity of a sign-instituting subject appears, presuming the order is closed.
The entire affect of the authors of Anti-Oedipus is tied up with this notion of
LfcUlUKfc l\ U J.1J
structural closure. It is suspected of cutting up, dismembering, violating the natu-
ral savageness of the (not yet represented) flows of desire, much as the torture
of memory production was dramatically portrayed in Nietzsche's Genealogy of
Morals.
Is all this supposed to mean that the flows of desire were uniform and unitary
before their "inscription" into the order of grammar? Not at all; they are manifold
and cannot be reduced to any principle of unity (on the contrary, it is grammar
that relates them to amissing-unity whose last savior and guarantor will be
Oedipus).
It is in the structure that the fusion of desire with the impossible is per-
formed, with lack defined as castration. From the structure there arises
the most austere song in honor of castration yes, yes, we enter the or-
der of desire through the gates of castration-once desiring-production
has spread out in the space of a representation that allows it to go on
living only as an absence and a lack unto itself. For a structural unity is
imposed on the desiring-machines that joins them together in a molar
aggregate; the partial objects are referred to a totality that can appear
only as that which the partial objects lack, and as that which is lacking
unto itself while being lacking in them (the Great Signifier "symboliza-
ble by the inherency of a - 1 in the ensemble of signifiers"). Just how
far will one go in the development of a lack of lack traversing the
structure? Such is the structural operation: it distributes lack in the mo-
lar aggregate. The limit of desiring-production-the border line separat-
ing the molar aggregates and their molecular elements, the objective
representations and the machines of desire-is now completely dis-
placed. The limit now passes only within the molar aggregate itself, in-
asmuch as the latter is furrowed by the line of castration. The formal
operations of the structure are those of extrapolation, application, and
biunivocalization, which reduce the social aggregate of departure to a
familial aggregate of destination, with the familial relation becoming
"metaphorical for all the others" and hindering the molecular productive
elements from following their own line of escape. (AO, 306-7)
I have purposely quoted a longer, self-contained passage that is meaningful in it-
self so that you can establish on the basis of the text your own criteria by which
to judge the interpretation I am going to give, and about which I myself am fully
aware that it stands on very slippery ground. I do believe, however, that one can
extrapolate the following view of the subject at hand from the text: "in them-
selves" the flows of desire do not obey any unity at all. Structure, t oo-as an order
of differentiation (to be sure, of recombination as well, but only on the basis of
prior separation)-does not in itself vouch for the subjugation of the represented
desires under a principle of unity. However, in order to train the elements-the
partial objects, also called molecules (I am not sure why)-to obey the voice of
334 LECTURE 21
a personal authority (of a sur-moi, a great subject, an ensemble molaire), one
has to invent a principle of unity. This is done by interpreting the variety and
manifoldness of the partial ojects in terms of a loss: they are many because, or
inasmuch as, they lack unity. However, their movements their flows-have the
meaning that they are looking for the missing unity. If one drums this self-
understanding into them, then they will consider themselves "castrated": cut
through, deprived of their integrity, lacking-and all the more desirous of (crav-
i n g ) - ^ unity of a point of orientation. This is offered to them in the form of
the illusion of the "good identification" of Oedipus, and they gladly seize on it
(308).
Apart from the fact that it is hard to see how one can possibly seduce the flows
of desire into believing in the illusion of Oedipal unity if the possibility of being
seduced, i.e., the desire to develop longings of this sort, was not already integral
to them, it is also hardly imaginable that a "molecular" multiplicity of desires
could possibly exist "in itself - i. e., prior to the entrance into the differentiation
of representation. Unity and multiplicity are corresponding ideas; they both origi-
nate to the same extent from conceptual work. (The Kantian tradition is probably
exerting a distorting influence at this point, since Kant considered "pure manifold-
ness of sensation" to be preintellectual, and thus untouched by the unitary princi-
ple of self-consciousness, whereas multiplicity, rather, is a categorical concept.)
Be that as it may, the multiplicity and lack of unity of the desiring-production
would, if it existed, by no means permit us to talk about it as a "primary process"
or a "savage primordial state," i.e., as something prereprescntative that is prior
to the order of grammar, much as Schopenhauer's will is prior to the representa-
tion that a subject (misconstruing its In-itself) has of it. The talk about savage de-
sire and its unbroken positivity free of negation is a mere phantasm from a precrit-
ical age, and is not deserving of the least attention, except perhaps as a
phenomenon and symptom of a thoroughly alarming readiness for flight from
civilization and regression in those times when the world, overwrought with
codes of all sorts (technical, industrial, pedagogical, bureaucratic, and last but
not least, military), justifies the desire to take refuge in relatively precivilized
ages.
Yet from the mere fact that already the multiplicity of the flows of desire, for
whose emancipation from the order of representation Deleuze and Guattari (if I
understand them even a little) are arguing, can be articulated only within the
structure of a symbolic (representative) order-otherwise they would have no
meaning and would be nobody's desire, since they would be unconscious (and this
is precisely what the authors deny)- from all this it does not follow reciprocally
that this order serves to train the partial objects for a "molar unity." In coming
lectures we will concern ourselves with the idea (that can already be found in
Saussure) that the law of differentiality by no means operates in the service of the
idea of structural closure. From the fact that I can determine something only when
LECTURE 21 335
I bring it into contrast with other things, it by no means follows that I can close
the chain of expressions that I distance from one expression, or that I can survey
this chain in its entirety. On the contrary, many things speak for the fact that these
chains are open and run on into infinity, that new expressions are constantly in-
scribed while others fall away, and that the form of the ensemble molaire is inces-
santly and uncontrollably changing. In fact, we considered this thought to be one
of the basic theoretical insights of all of neostructuralism.
This insight actually is also relevant, however, in an absurdly exaggerated
form, for Deleuze and Guattari themselves and their idea of the "boundless and
unreserved decoding," i.e., the depreciation of thought in code models. Yet what
prevents them from completely developing the consequence of this idea is, in
their case as in the case of Foucault, their attachment to a Manichaean dogma of
two worlds, something that sends the entire work reeling: on the one side the "or-
der of desire," on the other the "order of representation"; the latter represses the
former and trains it, at the end of a long chain of historical transformations, to
be obedient to the name of Oedipusthe desired I-identity.
This unsteadiness becomes particularly apparent in the indistinct way in which
the differential or indiflFerential character of either primary production or
schizophrenic transgression is described. We recall that the desiring-machines
link the partial objects by means of "connective syntheses," which are also called
"disjunctive." Now everybody knows that "disjunctive" means mutually exclu-
sive. But that cannot be what Deleuze and Guattari mean, for then the expression
"disjunctive synthesis" would be a contradiction in terms. Presumably they mean
"disjunctive" in the sense of "disjunctive judgment." A disjunctive judgment, as
we all know, has the form: "A is either B or C"; or: "A or B." Thus, here disjunc-
tion differentiates, but not necessarily in an exclusionary sense. In the form "A
or B" the "or" can be understood as inclusionary, in which case it would indeed
accomplish the synthesis of A and B.
This indecision between inclusion and exclusion is allegedly the typical form
of conclusion manifest in schizophrenic discourse (AO, 75ff.), whereas Oedipal-
ized discourse proceeds in an exclusionary manner.
The action characteristic of Oedipal recording is the introduction of an
exclusive, restrictive, and negative use of the disjunctive synthe-
sis. . . . It becomes nevertheless apparent that schizophrenia teaches
us a singular extra-Oedipal lesson, and reveals to us an unknown force
of the disjunctive synthesis, an immanent use that would no longer be
exclusive or restrictive, but fully affirmative, nonrestrictive, inclusive.
A disjunction that remains disjunctive, and that still affirms the dis-
joined terms, that affirms them throughout their entire distance, without
restricting one by the other or excluding the other from the one, is per-
haps the greatest paradox. "Either . . . or . . . or," instead of "ei-
ther/or." . . . This is free disjunction; the differential positions persist
336 LECTURE 21
in their entirety, they even take on a free quality, but they are all in-
habited by a faceless and transpositional subject. . . . It is because
the exclusive relation introduced by Oedipus comes into play not only
between the various disjunctions conceived as differentiations, but be-
tween the whole of the differentiations that it imposes and an undifferen-
tiated (un indiffrenci) that it presupposes, Oedipus informs us: if you
don't follow the lines of differentiation daddy-mommy-me, and the ex-
clusive alternatives that delineate them, you will fall into the black night
of the undifferentiated. . . . Oedipus says to us: either you will inter-
nalize the differential functions that rule over the exclusive disjunctions,
and thereby "resolve" Oedipus, or you will fall into the neurotic night
of imaginary identifications. Either you will follow the lines of the
trianglelines that structure and differentiate the three terms or you
will always bring one term into play as if it were one too many in rela-
tion to the other two, and you will reproduce in every sense the dual
relations of identification in the undifferentiated. (76, 77, 78, 79)
The resolution of Oedipus thus consists not in the resolution of differentiation but
rather in the nonexclusive use of the disjunctive conclusion, which simultane-
ously submits what is excluded to identification.
The difference is not between two uses of Oedipus, but between the
anoedipal use of the inclusive, nonrestrictive disjunctions, and the Oedi-
pal use of exclusive disjunctions, whether this last use borrows from the
paths of the Imaginary or the values of the Symbolic. (83)
Here are the examples that Deleuze and Guattari provide for what they call the
inclusive use of disjunction:
The schizophrenic is dead or alive, not both at once, but each of the
two as the terminal point of a distance over which he glides. He is child
or parent, not both, but the one at the end of the other, like the two
ends of a stick in a nondecomposable space. This is the meaning of the
disjunctions where Beckett records his characters and the events that be-
fall them: everything divides, but into itself. . . . "It is midnight. The
rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not rain-
ing." . . . "I am an Egyptian. I am a red Indian. I am a Negro. I am a
Chinaman. I am a Japanese. I am a foreigner, a stranger. I am a sea
bird. I am a land bird. I am the tree of Tolstoy. I am the roots of Tol-
stoy." (76, 77)
These examples show very clearly that nonexclusion functions at the level of
judgment, statement, and conclusion, and that it has nothing to do with the dis-
crimination of elementary signs. Of course, I can connect in nonexclusive form
terms that differ on the level of predicative acts, in the judgment "The rose is white
or red," for example. But that does not mean and it is trivial to point this out
LECTURE 21 337
that the terms "rose," "white," and "red" are not semantically differentiated. Many
of the so-called disjunctions which Deleuze and Guattari discuss are logically
noncontradictory in the first place, as is the case with the judgments "The rose
smells or is white"; or: "I am feeling weak and/or I am feeling strong." "White"
and "smell" do not mean the same thing, but they are nevertheless compatible
(noncontradictory); and the same person who now feels weak can feel strong at
another time (and the authors explicitly emphasize that the disjunctive "or" does
not assert simultaneity in the sense of a contrary or contradictory judgment: "It
would be a total misunderstanding of this order of thought if we concluded that
the schizophrenic substituted vague syntheses of identification of contradictory
elements for disjunctions, like the last of the Hegelian philosophers"; 76).
In short, the mode of junction that in these examples is called "inclusive dis-
junction" does not prove anything in support of the thesis that the flows of desire
of "primary production" escape what Lacan calls the "parade of the signifier"; i.e.,
they do not escape articulation and significance brought on by insertion into a
grammar. Let us make certain that the authors actually hold this thesis by citing
a few passages that make it quite clear.
The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use.
The question posed by desire is not "What does it mean?" but rather
"How does it work?" How do these machines, these desiring-machines,
work? . . . It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing,
but it works. Desire makes its entry with the general collapse of the
question "What does it mean?" No one has been able to pose the prob-
lem of language except to the extent that linguistics and logicians have
first eliminated meaning; and the greatest force of language was only
discovered once a work was viewed as a machine, producing certain
effects, amenable to a certain use. (109)
1
"Primary production" is thus asemantic, senseless, naturelike functioning that is
not disturbed in the least by the question about its legitimacy and purposefulness.
Because of their adventurous confusion of the logical function of the exclusive
disjunctive judgment with the function of semiological differentiation, the authors
arrive at the astonishing thesis that Oedipus is the product of a "coding of the sav-
age flow," of an "inscription of the grammar of the desiring-production," whereas
the schizophrenic undermines the distinctions of grammar. In reality the "schizo"
also speaks; "to speak," however, among other things, means to make use of
differentiated marks, regardless of how one later combines them into syntagmas
and judgments. Be that as it may, Deleuze and Guattari seem to consider the lan-
guage of the flows of desire to be "primary," and thus to be extragrammatical
(otherwise it would be incomprehensible how they can talk about a necessity of
"language" (langue) or "grammar," rather than of a necessity of logic), and they
seem to distinguish "grammar" from this medium of expression.
2
338 LECTURE 21
The structural impossibility of permanently subjugating a term of a linguistic
system to the unity of a closed order ("grammar") has here, as it were, sacrificed
any claim to more than partial validity: it does not apply to the flows of desire,
nor is it relevantat least not without restrictions to the "axiomatic of capital-
ism," which constantly transgresses all limits; it does, however, indeed apply to
all codes, including the encoding of the Oedipus complex into the desires of the
contemporaries of the capitalist world revolution.
The misunderstanding of grammar as an instrument of punishment and torture,
as a prison from which one cannot escape, perhaps goes back to Nietzsche, the
main source on which the authors rely. The expression "prison house of language"
presupposes the abdication of a subject that, when speaking, makes use of the
pregiven signs in order to express, as Lacan says, everything else but that which
language (langue) prescribes (see E, 155-56)-the resignation of a subject, but
by no means its empowerment. The protest against the coercion the "code" exer-
cises over the "codified" subjects logically presupposes the death (not only of
God, but also) of the subject that in its linguistic activity in some way relates to
this language, i.e., transgresses and changes it. If there were no subject, who
would suffer under the coercion of language? And even if there were a subject
that would blindly execute those activities conditioned by the code, a subject
abandoned in its passivity, then how could one suggest liberation from the code
in its name? A machine that in its essence is passive (which is moved by external
forces, by urge flows) could not even perceive the theft of its freedom by "gram-
mar" as a loss. If, therefore, Deleuze and Guattari-apart from the logical con-
tradiction in the very thought itself-"schizonomadically" (AO, 105) demand the
abolition of the laws, the "beyond all law" (82), "the destruction of all codes"
(250), "a breakthrough in grammar and syntax" (134), "a violence against syntax,
a concerted destruction of the signifier" (133) for the benefit of "non-sense erected
as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations" (133), then they are ap-
pealing, it seems to me, to a conception of the human being that has to be able
to account for its freedom (or potential for liberation).
3
Nowhere do they provide
an account of this, and I also cannot find one in the much more discursive earlier
writings of Deleuze. In Anti-Oedipus there is not even the slightest trace of a
move in this directionexcept for two declarations of sympathy with Sartre (256,
377).
"Never," Deleuze and Guattari write, "We'll never go too far with the deter-
ritorialization, the decoding of flows" (382). How is one supposed to conceive
the realization of this implied imperative? Certainly not in capitalism, which, al-
though it causes all the flows of desire to flow, nevertheless still sets (movable)
limits. Is it to be realized in schizophrenia, which even tears down the "absolute
limit," and thereby comes close to the "truth that only breaks open in delirium"
(see 4: "for the real truth-the glaring, sober truth that resides in delirium")?
I am not certain whether the authors would absolutely reject this thought. Ev-
LECTURE 21 339
ery "grammaticalization" appears to them to be a "repression of the desiring-
machines" (364); accordingly, the unfettering of the flows of desire, the liberation
of craving, appears as a revolutionary act ("desire as a revolutionary agency";
379), as the tearing down of the "last limit" that seeks to confine anarchist craving
in an order.
Completing the process and not arresting it, not making it turn about in
the void, not assigning it a goal. (382)
The passage which the authors cite from Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche et le cercle
vicieux points in a similar direction.
The day humans are able to behave as intentionless phenomena for ev-
ery intention at the level of the human being always obeys the laws of
its conservation, its continued existenceon that day a new creature
will declare the integrity of existence. . . . Science demonstrates by
its very method that the means that it constantly elaborates do no more
than reproduce, on the outside, an interplay of forces by themselves
without aim or end whose combinations obtain such and such a result.
(368)
Intentionality and directedness at a goal are characteristic features of rationality,
be it in the form of logic, in the form of grammar, as control of actions in the
name of reason, or as an order of whatever sort. In fact, "we believe in desire
as in the irrational of every form of rationality" (379). The "irrational process"
of the primary desiring-production operates without repression only if it is not
referred to an aim or a purpose ("it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in it-
self; 5).
Deleuze and Guattari draw two conclusions from this. The first is that every
discursive control of arguments and every reference of actions to an aim (for ex-
ample, revolution) implies an opting for repression, and against liberation (if
somebody now and then adds 2 + 2 = 4, or has the "aim" of fighting against
the alienation of the life world, one has to exorcise this purpose by means of
"schizoanalysis"). Second, they conclude that any form of limitation has to be
considered a form of antiproduction, which is inimical to life.
Let me start with a couple of observations regarding the second conclusion,
which is perhaps even weaker than the first one. Try to imagine, just for the fun
of it, a completely orderless chaos or a river that does not flow anywhere (and
thus has no aim). The sheer impossibility of complying with this request demon-
strates immediately that one indeed can imagine that a state of the world does not
exhibit the kind of order we wish it had, or that a river takes a different course
than we think it has; but we cannot imagine that the arrangement of the parts, in
the first instance, and the direction in which the river flows, in the second, cannot
be exactly described (as order and as finality). A sea that would stream out in all
340 LECTURE 21
directions and in ail dimensions would no longer flow (since flow presupposes a
direction) and would in the end dissolve into standstill and the emptiness of the
unlimited universe. The same is true for an aimless desire that fills the entire uni-
verse (are there desires that do not desire something?): such a desire would no
longer even exist as desire; nor would it have an object. Even desire has to
differentiate itself in order to experience itself as desire (and not as a nightmare);
furthermore, it must constitute a differentiated (thus ordered) world of things that
can be desired outside of itself, and it can evolve within an existing "order of
production" only as its determined negation.
This might seem sophistic. Nevertheless, no biologist, anthropologist, or phi-
losopher of nature would deny that organic production reaches its (always)
preliminary end in the completion of the product; that is, it has to interrupt itself
periodically and can articulate itself only in processes that do not destroy the law
of "organic equilibrium." (The parts of Deleuze and Guattarfs desiring-machine
know these "incisions" [coupures] [36ff.], which are hastily contrasted with the
incisions of structure, with the articuli of articulation.) Total dispersion would
be entropy. Without a minimum of order, the organism that relies on its environ-
ment and on other human beings (or partial objects) could not survive; without
minimal predictability of recurring (and thus regulated) experiences, none of us
would have the courage to begin the day. No, all organic production is accom-
plished within orders; however, this does not mean that it does not constantly al-
ter, challenge, and rework the status quo of these orders. In order to be able to
transgress the existing order in the direction of another order, one can eliminate
neither the idea of directedness at a goal nor that of order as such. Even the "non-
sense" with which the authors flirt is relative to a state of sense (of order) and,
beyond this relation, would lose its characteristic as the opposite or determined
negation of sense.
My objection to the first conclusion, which asserts that one has to help the sav-
age desires attain their rightful place by decoding and definalizing them, is of
greater consequence. Even assuming that the authors have in mind something like
the liberation of desireor even an anticapitalist revolutionone has to suppose
that they completely misunderstand themselves. Either their book has precisely
this meaning, the liberation of desire, in which case the rejection of final aims
is unintelligible, or it rejects this and all other purposes and pleads for the running
amok of Dionysus (who, to be sure, also has his own order, as does everything
else that occurs in this world, even if this is not the order that the bourgeois
desires).
4
But one has to pose the question in a more fundamental form, for, as we saw
in response to our examination of Foucault, the desire to eliminate order as such
can only be a desire that does not know what it desires, i.e., that does not under-
stand itself and that undermines its own basis for existence. If not in the name
LFXTURE21 341
of some (alternative) order, then in whose name do the authors fight against the
order of inscriptions, against the "coding of the savage flow"? One cannot subvert
existing circumstances withoutin opposition to this reality referring to a value
in whose name that which is can be subjected to criticism. Instead, Deleuze and
Guattari identify social (i.e., actual) production with desiring-production (see
24ff., a critique of the interpretation of craving as lack). This identification
deprives desire of any counterfactual character, something that can be guaranteed
only by its displacement onto the level of representation (i.e., of lack, of not hav-
ing), and which would make the (continually cited) literary text into a quasiethical
authority over against the dominant power. The fantasies exiled to the sphere of
the unreal now are suing for the happiness of which real society divested itself.
A morality, to be sure, would not be very far removed from an (Oedipal) su-
perego and would appeal to concepts like "reason," "purpose," and "meaning."
But since the production-machine knows nothing about this (it is enough that it
functions), the anarchism of the authors has to remain a matter of caprice and ac-
cident, in the worst sense of the word. It is similar to that "simplest surrealist act"
of which Breton dreamed ("of going down into the street . . . and firing into the
crowd at random as long as you can")
5
and of which Sartre says that this dream
found its realization in everyday fascism. The total (and imaginary) destruction
of which surrealism dreams, however, does no one any harm ("The total abolition
it dreams of does not harm anybody precisely because it is total").
6
The attack
here is directed not at this or that order but at the principle of order as such. This
makes the guardians of a particular order relax (for example, of the order in
which we live and under whose repression we suffer); from this quarter, so they
say to themselves, we are not threatened by any real danger.
I consider this universal attack on order as such (whether it manifests itself in
the State, in the penal system, in scientific disciplines/disciplinings, in grammar,
discourse, family, or even in the conceptual or ethical self-mastery of a subject-
in short, everywhere that blind action controls itself by means of the question of
its possible legitimation and generalizability) to be a specific exaggeration of Fou-
cault's approach (to which Deleuze not only stands in close proximity, but on
which his works are constructed). No one denies that it was Foucault who first
directed our attention to the phenomena of "madness and society." But his
works and above all those of his students: Deleuze, the Nouveaux Philosophes,
and among them, unfortunately, the Nouvelle Droite as welloperate with a
strongly polysmie concept of reason, that even in its negation is inadequate.
Similar to the "dialectic of enlightenment," reason is, on the one hand, a revolu-
tionary and emancipatory medium; one appeals to the reason of the reader when
one attacks the conditions of our prisons and asylums. On the other hand, "reason
is torture," as Foucault recently said; it is reason that locks up nonreason in an
asylum, that banishes it from the bourgeois order. That is because reason implies
order; but every order is intolerant toward nonorder, this profoundly relative con-
342 LECTURE 21
cept, which becomes the opponent of order only according to the axioms of the
participants in a worldview (in a "symbolic order") articulated in a certain man-
ner, and which constitutes itself by means of innumerable exclusions. In the thin
air of such abstraction, the Foucaultian concept becomes an-archic in an untena-
ble sense: it indeed can no longer be comprehended why one "should distinguish
between Stalin and Hitler, Marx and Nietzsche, Bakunin and Gentile" (as the New
Philosophers in Paris teach). Every form of control over beings-or, as some say,
over "productivity," over the "vital machine"that is directed by reason is ac-
cused of violence; the resigned leftist challengers of yesterday now take theoreti-
cal tranquilizers and spiritual analgesics (instead of working through their sorrow
and returning to praxis). Because of their factual indifference (i.e., because of
their unwillingness to take a position against the existing order and for an alterna-
tive order, one that would still be an order of intersubjective coexistence), they
become the advance guard of a fatal integration of the individual into the domi-
nant power. A kind of political and intellectual flipping-out, a spiritual Caliban-
ism, a certain uncommon style that barely disguises its poverty of thought behind
a flurry of images, and the limitless self-pity of many of our left intellectuals of
yesterday; these are the characteristic features of this type of imitatio of Foucault.
We only have to remind ourselves of the already fascistically colored neovital-
isms that, as a result of the rediscovery of Gobineau, Nietzsche, and Chamber-
lain, are creeping back, this time not so much in Germany, the homeland of blind
respect for blind productivity, as in France. And they are all the more dangerous
due to their anarchist touch that displeases the average bourgeois. But to displease
the bourgeois is, as I have said, in itself not enough: after all, even nazism was
a "completely unbourgeois adventure."
It is necessary, it seems to me, to banish a disposition toward action that is not
undangerous simply due to the degree of its currency, a disposition I would like
to characterize in the following way: out of eagerness to defend the claims of the
"schizo" against the terror of norms, one ends up conducting polemics against the
concept of norm as such, and thereby becomes a militant supporter of the suicide
of those norms with which everyday capitalism presents us. Deleuze and Guattari
basically recognize this themselves when they characterize fascism as a "para-
noid" reaction to the constant displacement of the limit and to the permanent de-
struction of the "possibility of believing" (249-51, 257-58). The capitalist state,
according to their argument, nourishes fascistoid longings on its very ground;
that is, it nourishes the archaic desire for reterritorialization, for reattainment of
a firm code (which is impossible under the condition of total economy).
These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they
are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of
"imbricating," of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resus-
citating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons. Neoarchaisms, as
LKCTURE 21 U 343
Edgar Morin puts it. . . . The fascist State has been without doubt
capitalism's most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritori-
alization. But the socialist State also has its own minorities, its own ter-
ritorialities, which re-form themselves against the State, or which the
State instigates and organizes. (257-58)
On the other hand: "Completing the process, and not arresting it . . . we'll
never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows" (382). And
since no one proceeds any further than the "schizo," who reaches the "absolute
limit," the absurd imperative surfaces, one that demands that one uncover truth
in delirium (3).
Once again (for faced with this symptomatic tendency to "dangerous thinking,"
it seems to me appropriate to "make a memory"
7
for the students of Deleuze and
Guattari and to speak to their consciences): one will never defeat the terror of
given codes by challenging the concept of the code as such (that would mean both
closing one's eyes to all actually existing codes, and remaining silent about the
dominant structural power in the name of an only virtual one). One must rather
uncover and explain the repressive effect of this or that concretely analyzed norm,
with foresight toward whichever conception of the human being, and of its non-
violent coexistence with other human beings, on the basis of which one criticizes
this norm. In other words, which contrafactual norm surfaces from the socially
repressed fantasies of people like Beckett, Artaud, or Aragon? Whoever poses
the question in this way does not "code" morality ("Oedipus"!); rather, he sides
with the desi ring-production of subjects, and against the apparatuses that obstruct
their development. Such a morality of contrafactual political engagement I find
at work both in the works of Foucault, as well as in those of Deleuze and Guattari.
The unfortunate thing about it is that these authors factually advocate their moral-
ity, but can in no way legitimate it on the basis of the premises of their semiotic
anarchism. If they thus hove a morality themselves, it remains principally un-
founded, arbitrary, decisionistic, and ideologically exploitable by the Left as well
as by the Right. That is a result of their faulty radicalism-universalism: in the end
it touches everything and everybody, but nothing and nobody in particular, and
is just as acceptable to those who dominate as is the universal condemnation of
being and its powers by the radical and impotent "No" that Schopenhauer's pessi-
mism launches against the world.
It is true that traditional ethics appeals to a theory of subjectivity, and there
are noteworthy reasons (Derrida has presented some of them) for suspending the
concepts of the "subject" and of "self-understanding," at least until their function
in the text of philosophy, of psychoanalysis, and of the social sciences is illumi-
nated. But that cannot mean that we should liquidate the subject (the actually ex-
isting industrial societies and the institutions of the "administered world" are far
more adept at this; why compete with them on the level of theory?); rather it can
344 LJ LbL-lUKti l\
only mean that one has to explain subjectivity better and in a more adequate way
than has been done by philosophy up to now. For even if the classical hermeneutic
concept of "self-understanding" exhibits conceptual problems, I can still hardly
imagine that we can expect a solution of the problem from an alternative theoreti-
cal concept that is founded on the principle of the ^understanding of itself.
"Whoever strives for something infinite," Friedrich Schlegel says in the forty-
seventh Lyceum fragment, "does not know what he wants. But this statement can-
not be inverted."
8
Lecture 22
Anti-Oedipus was announced as the first of two volumes devoted to the subject
of "capitalism and schizophrenia"; the second volume, which appeared in 1980,
is entitled A Thousand Plateaus.
l
It is only in a fairly removed sense the continua-
tion of the first volume, primarily because it expounds in even more extreme for-
mulations the polemic against the presumption that a book must have a purpose,
a theme, or must engage itself for an issue (for example, the intention of com-
municating something to somebody the reader).
This volume is a collection of essays that display a marked disparity of style
and are of greatly uneven quality. Some of them fit well into the witty rubric of
"most diffuse thoughts," under which the notes of the insane conductor Kreisler
are categorized "with truly vicious irony" by his cousin.
2
Other essays, on the
other hand, appear to owe their existence to the application of the rules of that
party game in which the participants, one after the other, but without com-
municating about their ideas, have to draw a part of the body: the first person
draws the head, the second the upper torso, the third the lower torso down to the
knees, the last the calves and feet. The sheet of paper is folded back each time
so that the next person has nothing else to go on, except for seeing where to con-
tinue drawing the lines. Each level of such a drawing of the body would in
Deleuze and Guattari's terminology be called a "plateau" (MP, 33), and the en-
tire male or female body would be composed of mille plateaux, if one folds the
paper enough times.
345
346 LECTURE 22
Each morning we got up, and each of us asked himself which plateaus
he was going to take, writing five lines here, ten lines elsewhere. We
had hallucinatory experiences, we saw lines, like columns of little ants,
leave one plateau and go to another. We made converging circles. Each
plateau can be read in any place, and brought into relation with any
other. A method is needed that indeed makes the multiple; no
typographical artfulness, no lexical cleverness, mixture, or creation of
words, no syntactic audacity can replace it. The latter, in fact, are most
often merely mimetic procedures intended to disseminate or dislocate a
unity maintained in another dimension for a book image. Techno-
narcissism. Typographical, lexical, or syntactic creations are necessary
only if they cease belonging to the form of expression of a hidden
unity, and become themselves one of the dimensions of the multiplicity
under consideration; we know of very few successes in this genre. We
have not been able to do this on our own behalf. We have only used
words that, in turn, functioned for us like plateaus. (33)
Many of the essays are indeed composed according to this principle. Yet others,
as for example "Postulates of Linguistics" (95-139) and "On Some Orders of
Signs" (140-84), turn out, if one judges them sine ira et studio, to be better
thought through, more stimulating, and theoretically more extensive than that
which was presented in Anti-Oedipus. I for my part cannot simply agree with the
authors when they claim that in the composition of Mille Plateaux a nonsignificant
recording (pas de signifiance, 33, passim), indeed, a completely asignificant writ-
ing {criture tout fait asignifiante, 16ff.), was supposed to have been practiced.
Nothing is senseless in this book, since it contains mostly well-formed sentences;
yet many things in it are nevertheless non-sense (to apply a distinction frequently
used in analytical philosophy). Let's rely then, as far as this is concerned, on our
own judgment rather than on that of the authors.
Before we close the chapter on "subjectivity" and begin with the third question
that we want to address to neostructuralism, I would like to direct your attention
to a thematics that was already present in Anti-Oedipus and if the metaphor of
the center is still appropriate-which is the central concern of A Thousand
Plateaus. I am thinking of the idea of a completely unityless multiplicity, whose
conceptual opposite is the "subject." Let me begin with the remark that I consider
the interest-indeed, not seldom, the pathosdevoted to this topic to be sympto-
matic and worth some attention; this is true even when the manner in which the
authors treat or mistreat the problem appears to us little worthy of imitation, or
not even amusing.
Nowhere in neostructuralism, not even in Derrida, does the longing for the
unlimiting of the ego, and the dismissal of all requirements that a statement be
founded in a principle, find such strong expression as in Deleuze and Guattari.
Before we pronounce any judgment on it, this longing itself must first of all be
LECTURE 22 347
understood and, what is more elementary yet, must be acknowledged as a wide-
spread feeling in our times. To be sure, A Thousand Plateaus is a largely wasted
chance to bring home to us the importance of the issue, if we have not already
recognized it; but we also do not want to pay the authors the negative tribute of
having diverted us from the significance of the subject matter by the dgot their
(by and large) unsubstantial prattle provokes, a subject matter that, however dis-
torted, leaves its mark even in these essays. There are sounder writings that make
the opposite mistake of ignoring the entire dimension of contemporary "knowl-
edge interests" articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and, as we will see, in a more
convincing fashion already in Diffrence et rptition.
The idea of the unityless multiplicity is fundamentally always articulated in
metaphors. In Anti-Oedipus it was the metaphor of the machine (although this is
actually a catachresis rather than a metaphor); in A Thousand Plateaus it is the
metaphor of the rhizome, taken from botany. "Rhizome"-from the Greek f|
pia, the root, the bud, or T pico|ia, rootedness, the stem-refers to a particu-
lar metamorphosis of the axis of a plant.
Usually the bud of a plant is an erect, leaf-bearing axis with a terminal growth
point: the places at which the leaves are connected to it are the nodes; the sections
of the stem between the nodes are called the internodes. The branching off can,
in the simplest cases, occur either laterally or dichotomously; in the first case,
where the lateral branches remain subordinate to the main stem, botanists speak
of monopodia; on the other hand, where the main stem divides into two side
shoots, which, for their part, continue to branch off dichotomously (by a further
forking of each branch), one speaks of a dichasium (or, when there are more than
two shoots, of a pleichasium). These types of shoots, in which all the branches
can be traced back to the unity of one stem (and one root), are appropriate
metaphors, according to Deleuze and Guattari, for a characterization of sys-
tematic thinking or thinking that evolves from the unity of one principle, as it is
typical of thought in its metaphysical manifestation.
. . . the law of the One that becomes two, then two that become
four. . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the tree root. Even a
discipline as "advanced" as linguistics retains as its basic image this tree
root, which connects it to classical reflection [and its law of the One
that doubles back upon itself in becoming two, but in the form of a du-
ality of which each element boils down to the unity and the unicity of
the same sole dialectical root] (thus Chomsky and the syntactic tree, be-
ginning at a point S and developing by means of dichotomy). Which
comes down to saying that this thought has never understood multiplic-
ity: it needs to assume a strong main unity in order to get to two fol-
lowing a spiritual method. (11)
348 LJ LECTURE 22
We should add that for Deleuze and Guattari the "subject" of philosophy serves
precisely the function of supplying a mental (gelstige) unity that binds the
proliferating multiplicity to the simplicity of one source (one foundation, one
root, one origin, one law). This is prototypically the case in the instance of Kant's
idea that the manifold of sensual perception must be subordinated to the unity of
the categories, and to the unity of self-consciousness, in order to be recognized.
But nature knows metamorphoses of the growth of shoots that are not readily
compatible with the metaphor of the dichotomously branching tree of knowledge
(or of syntax). Deleuze and Guattari remind us of the systme-radicelle, ou racine
fascicule (12).
This time, the main root has aborted, or is rotting toward its tip; then
an immediate and commonplace multiplicity of secondary roots come
and graft themselves onto it, and begin developing vigorously. This
time, the natural reality appears in the abortion of the main root, but its
unity nonetheless subsists as past or to come, as possible. (12)
The image is not a bad one. True, we are no longer talking of the growth of
shoots, but rather of the growth of roots, and we therefore have to add that,
roughly speaking, there are two different kinds of root systems: the stem-based
roots of the monocotyledons, and the branching of the main root in the case of
the dicotyledons. In the second case-the case of an allorhizomatic root system
(think of the carrot, Daucus carota) there is a well-developed main root from
which side roots branch off left and right, and these side roots, for their part, can
also have further branches. In the first case the so-called homorhizomatic root
system (for example, corn, Zea mays)-thc branched roots take off at the lower
end of the stem itself, so that instead of one main root, an entire bundle of roots
extends into the earth, and each of those roots again sends off side branches.
Books that are composed according to this principle, so say Deleuze and Guat-
tari, only apparently renounce metaphysical unitary thinking, for the swarm of
independent and multiple roots comes together in the unity of one single stem.
The aborters of unity are indeed here makers of angels [faiseurs d'ange,
abortionists], doctores angelici, since they afrm a unity that is
properly angelic and superior. The words of Joyce, rightly said to be
"of multiple roots," indeed break up the linear unity of the word, or
even of language, only by positing a cyclical unity of the sentence, the
text, or knowledge. The aphorisms of Nietzsche break up the linear
unity of knowledge only by referring to the cyclical unity of the eternal
return, present like a not-known of thought. Which comes down to say-
ing that the installment system does not really break with dualism, with
the complementarity of a subject and an object, of a natural reality and
a spiritual reality: unity is unceasingly thwarted and squelched in the
object, whereas a new type of unity wins out in the subject. The world
LECTURE 22 349
has lost its pivot, the subject can no longer even make up a dichotomy,
but rather accedes to a higher unity of ambivalence or overdetermina-
tion, in a dimension that is always supplementary to that of its object.
The world has become chaos, but the book remains the image of the
world, chaosmos-rootlet rather than cosmos-root. What strange mysti-
fication of the book-all the more total by virtue of being fragmented.
(12-13)
Finally, there is the rhizome, a further metamorphosis of the stem and the main
root. Rhizomes are underground, for the most part horizontally growing clumped
shoots whose roots are formed at the stem. In each period of growth they form
a shoot that breaks through the surface of the earth and which dies later on, while
an underground section of vegetation continues growing in a horizontal direction.
In the case of Solomon's seal (Polygonatum mulliflorum), the main shoot breaks
through the surface, while the axis continues to grow under the ground, resulting
in a sympodial organization of the rhizome.
It is clear what the rhizome accomplishes as an illustrative vehicle. It serves
as the scheme for all Deleuze and Guattari expect from the movement of the flows
of desire and of thoughts, but also from the unregulated unfolding of the multiple.
In truth, it does not suffice to say Long live the multiple, though this
cry is hard to utter. No bit of typographic, lexical, or even syntactic
cleverness will suffice to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not
by always adding a higher dimension, but on the contrary in the sim-
plest way possible, by dint of sobriety, at the level of the dimensions at
one's disposal, always n 1 (only in this way is the one part of the
multiple, by always being subtracted). Substract the unique from the
multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1. Such a system could be
called rhizome. (13)
The image is supposed to express a dcentrai growth freed both from the charge
of the central root, as well as from that of the root bundle that comes together
at one stem. Those shoots (plants) that break through the surface of the earth are
not true individuals ("subjects"), but rather partial objects of the total organism:
i.e., secondary regressions of the plant world in the direction of the cell colonies
of tallophytes, whose parts are absolutely equal to each other (since they are not
differentiated), and which react like physiological units, although they are not ele-
ments of a central organism: they are aggregates rather than units. This lack of
an individuating unity and "individuation" originally means (for example, in the
language of early romanticism) unification, suspension of differentiation/division
(/^differentiation, individuation) is supposed to be indicated by the formula
n ~ 1 (see also 31): unity is always subtracted anew from the proliferation of
multiplicity, so that the chain can never be concluded and completed in a final
term, as is the case in the systems of metaphysics (Hegel's, for example).
350 a LECTURE 22
As inconspicuous and undeveloped as the playfully introduced formula n 1
may be, it nevertheless points involuntarily to the limitations in the exploitability
of the image of the dcentrai or "plagiotropic" (running at a slant to the plant)
growth (not only the underground rhizomes, like the lily of the valley, or the bul-
bous plants, like the potato, but also the plants that form shoots above ground,
like the strawberry, belong to the metaphorical complex of what in A Thousand
Plateaus is called "rhizome"). None of these metamorphoses illustrates the limits
of the classical concept of organization, but they show to what extent it can be
expanded: in the final analysis even the ecosphere constitues a total organism that
overarches all the individual organisms contained in it, without this resulting in
the abrogation of the principle of finality. Nobody would doubt the organic
character of the brain with the ridiculous remark that the expanding and dcen-
trai mesh of axons that connect the neurons has a certain similarity with the
plagiotropic connection of the colonies of lily of the valley (24). The fact that
channels exist or can be formed between all neurons points to the closure and cir-
cularity of the brain functions, which always work for the benefit of the unity of
consciousness. To draw conclusions from the material form of cells, axons, syn-
apses, etc., about the form of consciousness of thought would be almost as intelli-
gent as to believe that the perception of a polyhedron would itself be polyhedral
or would require an angular head. Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari point in
this direction.
Many people have trees in their heads, but the brain itself is more of a
weed than a tree. (24)
From which they draw an inference about the rhizomatic nature of the functions
of consciousness and memory.
All that is comical at best. The formula n 1, however, teaches us in a more
impressive way that in order to determine multiplicity as such, I have to refer
negatively to a unity. As soon as I say, for example, that manifoldness is dcentrai
or without unity, I have already negatively referred to a unity without which I
would not be able to think multiplicity as that which it is. No one can escape the
"law of reflection of all our knowledge: namely, that nothing is known as what
it is, without our also thinking of what it is not."
3
Even the thought of multiplicity
either has a meaning (in which case it cannot be all-encompassing, but rather must
allow for an oppositional concept), or, on the other hand, it loses this distinction
and thereby ceases to designate "multiplicity." (There is something completely
analogous to this in Hegel's Logic in the case of the purely negative concept of
"Being," conceived as "pure indeterminateness" or "relation only to itself
1
; that
is, as what follows in the Logic demonstrates, this concept is already determined
as negative with foresight to its opposite.)
Deleuze and Guattari's advocacy of the idea of a decentralized multiplicity
misses its target at this point. If one can make evident for the thought of an all-
LECTURE 22 U 351
encompassing unity (for example, Fichte's "F or Spinoza's "Absolute") that it can
be conceived only under the condition that it include precisely what it would like
to exclude (a difference, arising simultaneously to it, which is not I and not abso-
lute), then its opposite is just as true: a multiplicity that is totally disconnected
from the contrastive thought of unityto whatever extent negatively could not
be a "principle," but rather would be comparable to that zero phoneme about
which linguists speak in order to designate a phoneme distinguished from all other
phonemes of a language "by the absence of any distinctive features and of any
constant sound characteristic."
4
In other words, one does not escape metaphysics and its unicentrism simply
by inverting its premises and turning the privileging of the identity principle into
the privileging of multiplicity. Such an abstract opposition is always already
metaphysical and does not escape the dialectic of that irrevocable reciprocity that
allows neither of the two moments to pose as the totality. Even multiplicity, con-
ceived as an abstract contrastive concept to that of unity, would, if the thought
were tenable, have the character of a principle and would be an idea (Einbildung)
that would not understand itself.
This is a fundamental objection, and for this reason it has bearing on all six
"principles" that Deleuze and Guattari mention as the "approximate features" of
the rhizome (13). (Here I am skipping over the fact that the frequent mention of
"arrangement"for example, of the "collective arrangement of the act of enuncia-
tion" [13]as well as that of the "principles [of rhizome]" [13] appeals precisely
to those concepts that only a short time earlier had been rejected as the consti-
tuents of unity and order.)
5
Deleuze and Guattari seek to characterize the "arrangement" of the rhizome-
like connection between individuals with the following "principles":
1st and 2nd principles of connection and heterogeneity (13);
3rd principle of multiplicity (14);
4th principle of asignifying rupture;
5th and 6th principles of cartography and tracing mania. (19)
We are already familiar with most of these "principles" from Anti-Oedipus and,
by the way, also from Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge. Let's nevertheless
see how Deleuze and Guattari try to put into practice the thought of a multiplicity
that has no unity.
The principle of connection states that "any point of a rhizome can be con-
nected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or the root,
which determines a point, an order" (13). This polemic is primarily directed
against systematic linguistics from structuralism to Chomsky, which in all its
manifestations is dominated in one way or another by the obsession to derive lin-
guistic events or effects of meaning from a more or less inviolable order (code,
grammar). If this were the case, a continuum would exist between the rules of
352 11 LECTURE 22
langue and the acts of parole; the individual speech events would never be any-
thing other than the particular cases in which the universal is reproduced without
loss of meaning. In order to refute the thought of such a continuity between the
individual event and the universal code, the authors introduce the second princi-
ple, that of heterogeneity. Applied to the concept of language (langage), it
asserts:
A semiotic link is like a tuber agglomerating a great variety of acts
linguistic, but also perceptive, mimic, gestual, and cognitive: there is
no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse
of dialects, provincial dialects, slangs, special languages. There is no
ideal speaker or listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguis-
tic community. . . . A language is never closed in on itself except in a
function of impotence. (14)
In this critique of the scientism of the code model we recognize once again the
legitimate kernel thought of what we are calling neostructuralism. We will de-
velop it further in the third and final part of our lectures, and at this point we only
want to take note that it connects A Thousand Plateaus, and already even Anti-
Oedipus, with the basic theoretical motif of contemporary French philosophy. I
believe that this motif is already present in Anti-Oedipus in the distinction be-
tween the "molar" and the "molecular" aggregates (see, e.g., AO, 380; MP, 260,
passim). The molar aggregates correspond, if I understand this correctly, by and
large to the (social, linguistic, etc.) "structures," the molecular aggregates to the
individuals (conceived as irreducible singularities). Molaire and molculaire
designate "the two poles of social libidinal investment" (AO, 366). They can be
more closely defined,
the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to
the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a
given form of power or selective sovereignty; the other by the inverse
subordination and the overthrow of power. The one by these molar
structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regular-
ize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics; the other by the
molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the
large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations.
The one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the
flows, . . . the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and
deterritorialized flows, . . . the one is defined by subjugated groups,
the other by subject-groups. (AO, 366-67)
It is clear which of the two tendencies (which are also distinguished as the
"paranoic" and the "schizophrenic") is most esteemed by the "nomadology" of the
authors. What is interesting to us in this context, and in anticipation of future ob-
servations, is the particular attention Capitalism and Schizophrenia pays to the
LECTURE 22 G 353
asystatic and asystematic aspect of singularity and individuality (see AO, 76-77,
357-58, 132-34, passim). If this sympathy were not expressed in conjunction
with an untenable (and self-destructive) polemic against the idea of unity and sub-
jectivity, I, for my own part, would not hesitate to voice my sympathy with it.
(I will explain later in which sense and with what restrictions.)
At any rate, the "principle of multiplicity" would present itself in a new light
if its formulation were motivated by an interest in saving individual phenomena,
in saving both the individuals as well as the individual speech acts they produce.
But it is precisely this feature that the authors no longer stress; instead they oppose
in the already mentioned self-contradictory and fruitless way the principle of mul-
tiplicity to that of unity and, in addition, to that of the subject. The principle of
multiplicity, they claim, is not supposed to maintain any relation whatsoever with
that of the One as subject or as object (MP, 14).
No unity that serves as a pivot in the object or is divided in the subject.
No unity, even one that is aborted in the object, and "comes back" in
the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object. (14)
And above all no subject (with whose definition by neostructuralism we are
mainly concerned); for-as the authors tell us:
The notion of unity never appears except when the signifier takes power
in a multiplicity, or when a corresponding process of subjectification
develops. (15)
Here we once again come across the thesis of Anti-Oedipus, according to which
the development of the idea of a "homogeneous subject" has something to do with
the insertion into the order of representation (of the signifier, of the symbol). Un-
fortunately, the argument is even more fragmentary here than it is in the form
in which we are already familiar with it; it almost seems as if they mean and
the metaphor of the "seizure of power" suggests this-that the thought of a
homogeneous subject is formed as the relucence {Widerschein) of the unity of a
symbolic order, so to speak as the reflection of the "total meaning" of this order.
If that were the function of a subject, then it would indeed be incompatible with
the requirements of precisely those individuals who oppose the prescripts of the
symbolic order-including its "total meaning." But even without this regard for
the individuals, for the singularities, subjectivity does not have to be thought of
as the quasitranscendental unity of a symbolic order, since everyone agrees that
this order is differential and dcentrai. (We need only recall Derrida's text on
structure, sign, and play in WD [278ff.] and our discussion of it.)
It would be helpful if at this point we recalled one thing further, namely,
romantic hermeneutics. Here the singular or the individual is precisely not taken
as a principle of identity; whatever else "individuality" might mean, it is at any
354 D LECTURE 22
rate conceived as the direct opponent of the idea of unity and closure of structure.
We will come back to this when it is time to analyze the mechanism of change
in meaning within the framework of our third question addressed to neostructural-
ism. At this point it is enough to mention that for Schleiermacher, for example,
it is always and fundamentally the individual whose intervention prevents struc-
ture (or the signs stored by it) from coinciding with itself. To coincide with itself
would mean to be present. Now a structure or a structured sign can never coincide
with itself: first of all, because the thought of the differentness of signs presup-
poses the idea of time; and second, because each use of a sign assumes the iterabil-
ity of the sign (i.e., its simultaneity). The structuredness of the sign system
presupposes time, for it is time, as Hegel already demonstrated quite nicely, that
by letting a sound sink into the past (and thus fade out) first allows the following
sound to articulate itself in its differentness from the previous one. This applies
correspondingly for each sign and for each concatenation of signs: they have to
leave the present in order to be able to demarcate themselves in terms of those
that are present at any given moment. It is precisely by means of this submerging
in time, Hegel continues, that the signs yield their meaning (their intelligence,
as he says): the disappearance of the body of the word, by making room for a
second one (which then also fades out) simultaneously allows the internal
element-the significance of the sign to appear.
The word as something that sounds disappears in time; time thereby
proves itself in relation to the word to be abstract, i.e., merely destroy-
ing negativity. The true, concrete negativity of the linguistic sign, how-
ever, is intelligence, because it is by means of it that the sign is altered
from something external to something internal and is preserved in this
transmogrified form.
6
This preservation, for its part, is not conceived as mechanical. Precisely because
the sign (or the sound) has faded out, it is not (any longer) present to us. The
"reproducing memory"
7
has to be substituted for the loss of its presence. It "recog-
nizes the object in the name," but it does not accomplish this directly (for both
the name and the object designated by it have transpired), but only by means of
a hermeneutical hypothesis, which apprehends repeated occurrences of sounds
that acoustically are thoroughly distinguishable as occasions for the association
of the same meaning by virtue of interpretation. This identity is thus not one of
timeless coincidence, but rather literally an artifact: something that has been un-
controllably restored over the abyss of temporal depresencing.
The second aspect mentioned earlier is closely related to this. In order to be
an element of a structure, the sign has to be repeatable. In order to be articulated
a second time, the structure first has to step outside of itself in order to be put
back together beyond itself. The structure, in other words, is internalized by a
speaking individual, only to be subsequently nonidentically reexternalized. It is
LECTURE 22 355
thus the intervention of an individual that divides the timeless identity of structure
from itself. This division occurs in actuality, for the rules that relate to a structure
can only extend to the structure itself, but not, however, to the unforeseeable use
the individual makes of it. It is precisely for this reason that the individual, as
Schleiermacher puts it, cannot be derived from structure, or cannot be "a priori
constructed" from it {HuK, 172). It is its achievement that it brings the hypotheti-
cal identity of signs which always has to be conceived according to an index of
being past into a state of suspension by means o/the act of actualizing its mean-
ing (which always presupposes a depresencing of the sign-carrier). Structure can-
not guarantee the continuity between the (hypothetical) meaning inscribed in it
and always already past in the act of language use, and the new meaning acquired
in the individual use: this lack of a criterion for semantic identification, a lack
produced by the individual, refers the process of meaning attribution to the in-
finite (because incalculably open) procedure of hermeneutics (in the romantic
sense of the word). One can never definitively make a judgment about the unity
of a sign, a sentence, a text, or a symbolically interacting culture, for this unity
is constantly produced anew in use and in understanding. To attribute to it a
semantic-structural identity exposes itself as a scientistic fiction or as a dream of
the standstill of the irrevocably depresencing temporization (Zeitigung) into
which everything touched by the individual is submerged.
It would accordingly be idiotic to reject the subject with the claim that it is an
agency that brings the proliferating multiplicity of sign applications to a standstill:
"The notion of unity appears only when the signifier comes to power within a mul-
tiplicity or when there is a corresponding process of subjectification" (MP, 15).
I call this fear idiotic because it is simultaneously false on two counts. First, a
signifier, on close examination, could for structural reasons never bring the slid-
ing of meaning on its underside to a standstill (whereby the hasty conclusion about
a "subject" in the background that acts in the service of the violent instituting of
identity becomes untenable). Second, however, the nonfinality of understanding
(or, in other words, the insurmountability of multiplicity) does not mean that
there is no unity whatsoever of word signs or of speech acts, etc. If that were the
case, then not even A Thousand Plateaus would have been able to have been writ-
ten and presented to a reading public. It is absolutely enough, if one does not want
to fall into absurdity, to stress that each semiological synthesis has the status of
Being of a hermeneutical hypothesis. Lacan saw this very clearly when he spoke
of the anchoring of the flow of meaning on the sign chain at certain "anchoring
points." This means that the sign chain obviously culminates in the unity of an
interpretation, but that this unitary interpretation does not overcome the structural
ambiguity of the sign that always exists in nonsimultaneity to itself, without ever
concluding itself in an atcmporal self-presence. Meaning is always articulated at
two different points in time by partners participating in a process of communica-
tion, and it is always at least two different subjects that communicate with one
356 LECTURE 22
another (even in true self-dialogue).
8
From this follows the dualness of the mean-
ing attribution of the sign that could be broken only if one were to entirely elimi-
nate communication - i . e. , subjects in general - from the world. The attack on the
unity of understanding as such thereby misses the legitimate target of the code
model of understanding and flies off into the absurd. For if multiplicity were with-
out unity, then we would not only be able to understand neither provisionally nor
incompletely, we would be able to understand nothing; indeed, we would not be
able to understand at all. Not even the most delirious statements of Anti-Oedipus
attain this ideal.
Therefore a detailed criticism of the principle the authors call the "asignifying
rupture" (MP, 16ff.) is unneccessary. If "asignifying" is supposed to mean incal-
culable by the code, then we would be the first to agree. But just because it is in-
calculable by the code (the individual modification that the individual language
use induces in the semantic-pragmatic stock of linguistic types) does not mean
that it is therefore asignificant, i.e., unintelligible. As acts of hypothetical mean-
ing attribution, modifications are, on the contrary, always motivated (even the
"flipping out" of the "schizo" is motivated, and everything that Deleuze and Guat-
tari write about this represents attempts to understand the meaning of this "flip-
ping out," even if they obviously do not reflectively know what they are doing:
9
that simply happens sometimes, and it does not change anything about the truth
of the major term). This truth still holds even in view of the fifth and sixth so-
called principles, which justifiably claim that "a rhizome cannot be accounted for
by any structural or generative model" and that it "is irrelcvent to any idea of
genetic axis or deep structure" (19ff.).
It seems to me that the argumentation of the authors adheres to the following
rule: the model of subsumption, or code model of acting and speaking (which says
that each case of acting and speaking is an applied instance that reproduces the
rules of a deep structure, of a relational system, of a juridical dispositive, etc.,
identically in application), and the unifying operation of the subject are assigned
to each other. Since coded acting and speaking are a case of representation, the
idea of the identifiability of the subject thought with that of representation simul-
taneously surfaces ("Oedipus"-as the symbol for the conditioning of savage de-
sire to say I - i s at the same time the end product of its inscription into "gram-
mar"). They thus arrive at the equation of the individual with the subjective and
with the significant (against which the passage cited earlier, which increased the
value of the singular over against the general, had protested; but the authors lay
no claim whatsoever to consistency and scholarliness; MP, 33). Let me give a
characteristic example of this equation or, in more cautious terms, approxi-
mation.
There are only machinic arrangements of desire, and collective arrange-
ments of utterance. No significance, and no subjectification: write at n
LECTURE 22 U 357
(every individuated utterance is still imprisoned in the dominant signi-
fications, and all signifying desire refers to dominated subjects). (33)
One could probably subscribe to this passage under certain conditions -
conditions that, to be sure, it itself does not fulfill. This is the condition that the
word "significance" refers to the "meaning" (Bedeutung) communicated by the
coded sign (which is inscribed in a structure). Yet precisely this universal mean-
ing (I call it universal because it shows exactly the same face to all participants
in the same linguistic circle) is deuniversalized in the act of its individual applica-
tion. To the degree that the individual application is not "necessitated" by the
universal linguistic law-by the totality of its meanings-it can be called insigni-
ficant (it is in this sense that Saussure and Sartre speak of the individual and trans-
formational use of language as the lment non-signifiant). In this phrase, how-
ever, non-signifiant does not mean "senseless" (sinnlos), but only: bearing a not
yet universalized, an as yet only individually existing, so to speak virtual meaning
(Bedeutung). Such an individual meaning, which has not yet been reexternalized
into the repertoire of universality, is called "sense" (Sinn) by Schleiermacher and
Sartre. Sense (Sinn) is individual, meaning (Bedeutung) universal. But when
sense is nonsignificant, it nevertheless has something to say and can be under-
stood (by means of a hypothesis for understanding on the part of my discussion
partner, and the success of the hypothesis allows sense [Sinn] to make the transi-
tion to the mode of Being of a meaning [Bedeutung]).
But this is not how Deleuze and Guattari make their argument. For them "each
individualized expression" remains the recipient of a command and the prisoner
of the "subject that dominates it," or of the "meanings (Bedeutungen) that domi-
nate it." According to the premises of their own work-as unscholarly as it is,
even according to their own intention this conclusion is in fact irrefutable.
Yet, if we take a closer look, it is destructive for the entire theory. For if
individuation and individuation, as Saussure already emphasized, is the only
source for transformation of meaning (Bedeutung) (see EC, I, 28: "changes arise
from an individual")-cannor break the power of meanings (Bedeutungen), then
the power of meanings is absolutely inescapable. In other words, the description
of any code whatsoever as an instrument of coercion or (as Foucault expresses
it) of torture fundamentally presupposes that a code (and not the human beings
that attend to it) is capable of coercing. In order to assume this, one has first of
all to conceiveand be it only in order to contradict this view afterwardsthe
code just as structurally or generative-grammatically as the linguists and systems
theoreticians do who are ridiculed by Deleuze and Guattari. According to this,
then, the linguist and systems theoretician would simply be correct. Even those
who call for the "decoding" of a code or the "exploding" of the order of discourse
have to face the consequence that such a code, such an order, first of all has to
be viewed as actual. As a matter of fact, if one hopes to show the individual "the
3S8 U Lh Ll UKt Ll
exit from the flytrap," as Wittgenstein put it, then one also has to challenge the
idea of the code-as Derrida does-and not only its existence.
If, however, it were the case that there are codes-no matter how odious they
may seem-and that one cannot escape their power, then the unfettered delirium
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia would still be blind execution of the order of
a discourse that simply does not see through to its own rules of generation, to the
requirements of repetition and the obsessive desire that shape it. In short, only
those who explode the theoretical framework of the authors' text, and do this with
foresight toward a theory of the individual subject that internalizes structures in
a nonidentical way and reexternalizes them in an altered form, can liberate their
right-minded kernel thought and take it over into a newly defined epistemic
framework. That would mean bringing into play a hermeneutics of individuality
of a sort in which the individual moment is not an opponent, but rather a moment
of the structure; that is, a moment of such a type that it prevents the structure from
closing itself and thus prevents it from exercising a one-sided determination.
10
Only hermeneutics offers the prospect not only of promising us this liberation but
of actually providing it.
Lecture 23
Even if what Deleuze and Guattari try to palm off on us about the genesis of sub-
jectivity in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia seems to us to be
unconvincing, indeed, questionable, we still should not overlook that Gilles
Deleuze presented an incomparably more sophisticated and discriminating ar-
gumentation at the end of the sixties. I am mainly thinking of Diffrence et rpti-
tion of 1968.
1
Although even in this work no room was made for the idea of the
subject (as in Capitalism and Schizophrenia it is conceived as the agency of the
work of unification, as an agent in the service of "representation," and as the ad-
versary of the emancipation of difference); however, one can find in this book
notable insights into the mode of Being of individuality (which is strictly opposed
to subjectivity). These insights seem to me so noteworthy that I believe our lec-
ture series cannot avoid a discussion of them, especially since they supply us with
a particularly good point of departure for our examination of the problematics in
the third question we want to address to neostructuralism.
If I am correct, the theoretical approach of Mille Plateaux remains far behind
that of Diffrence et rptition, inasmuch as the first presents in abstract fashion
an "anarcho-structuralist" and impotent polemic against the domination of the
model of encoding and representation, whereas in the latter the idea of the code
as such is undermined. It makes a big difference whether I first acknowledge the
idea of the code (as idea) and then reject it (as reality), or whether I expose the
untenability of the idea that there is a system of structural determination or
causality.
This is exactly what Deleuze does in Diffrence et rptition. His attack is here
1<Q
360 LECTURE 23
directed at the idea of a self-enclosed system (and that is what justifies an exami-
nation of Deleuze's work within the framework of a lecture series on neostruc-
turalism). Such a system, if it existed, would be universal to the extent that its
elements would be particular cases that would correspond to the rules of the sys-
tem. The decisive thing is that an element that is conceived as an applied instance
of the general system, insofar as it is a particular of the system, can never con-
tradict the general law of the system or deviate from it. It is from this agreement
of particular and general that the universality of the system results, for, trivially
enough, whatever is not contradicted in the realm of application is true generally.
This congruity of the general and the particular is verified in the possibility
that the particular can be infinitely repeated without loss of meaning. Since from
the outset it is defined as the special case in which a universal rule makes itself
adequately manifest, it is deprived of all those features by means of which it could
maintain its independence over against the universal. That is the difference be-
tween the particular and the individual. A concept, for example, is particular and
general at the same time. It is particular insofar as it is distinguished from other
concepts, but it is simultaneously general because it ignores the individual
makeup of the things and states of affairs to which it refers. For it is precisely
not the individuality of the objects of which it takes account, but rather the feature
they all have in common, the central concern, which gathers an infinite number
of individually different elements in the unity of one single viewpoint. A concept
has this characteristic in common with a word-sign. Both necessarily refer to the
common aspect of what can be thought and what can be experienced; both obliter-
ate any regard for the individual. In this sense it would be trivial to say that
thought and speech can never be a private matter, for what is expressed in a semi-
ologically articulated thought is always its nonprivate aspect, i.e., that aspect that
is communal and general. For the same reason, there is no danger that the repeti-
tion of a concept-sign could modify its signification; its generality and com-
municability rest precisely in the fact that it abstracts from the individual aspects
of experience. This abstraction, for its part, which makes a "general speech type"
(as Humboldt called it) out of the individual and constantly changing reference
to a single state of affairs in the world, guarantees the closure of the conceptual-
semantic repertoire on the basis of which I symbolically mediate my living-with-
others-in-the-same-world.
The iterability of linguistic "schemes" or conceptual "types" does not, there-
fore, represent a danger for the univocality of the (conceptual or linguistic) "sys-
tem" that serves as the basis for their production; rather it guarantees it. Let's cite
here John A. Searle, a philosopher of language who supports this view.
Any linguistic element written or spoken, indeed any rule-governed ele-
ment in any system of representation at all must be repeatable, other-
wise the rules would have no scope of application. To say this is just to
LECTURE 23 D 361
say that the logician's type-token distinction must apply generally to all
the rule-governed elements of language in order that the rules can be
applied to new occurrences of the phenomena specified by the rules.
Without this feature of iterability there could not be the possibility of
producing an infinite number of sentences with a finite list of elements;
and this, as philosophers since Frege have recognized, is one of the
crucial features of any language.
2
Under a "token" the logicians mentioned earlier understand the individually ap-
plied case of a universal linguistic or conceptual type, or a logical rule. The point
of distinction between "type" and "token" is, however, as Searle's formulation
very nicely brings out, that it can basically be suffused: from the perspective of
experiential reality (of the "phenomenal" world), the unity of the rule of the type
has nothing to fear, for its new occurrences are always and necessarily reduced
to the already established and unaltered form of the type. The type thus functions
as an instrument for the parrying of conceptual or semantic innovation. Searle
also formulated this in particularly clear fashion.
Any conventional act involves the notion of the repetition of the same.
(/?, 207; emphasis added)
In other words, to the extent that a type is a "conventional act" (i.e., something
tied in with a linguistic convention, with an intersubjectively valid code), its repe-
tition can only be the repetition of something that is formally and materially the
same. Only what is generally valid, what is common to all, is repeatable (let's be
more cautious and add: repeatable with an identical meaning).
Now one has to recognize that the condition that has just been developed with
regard to the describability of a language as a grammar is in general a presupposi-
tion of the scientific method. A scientist (whether biologist, anthropologist, psy-
chologist, or sociologist) would never maintain about a result he or she has ar-
rived at over the course of his or her work that it has the status of "knowledge"
if it were not capable of also laying claim to generalizability. Science knows no
individual states of affairs, or rathersince the scientist as a person, of course,
knows them very well the individual states of affairs are sorted out for the be-
nefit of a standardized knowledge about whose validity there is general agree-
ment. (Of course, the universality of canonical knowledge cannot exclude the
possibility that it be challenged and that it be in need of revision, as the history
of the natural sciences teaches us in just as drastic a fashion as that of the human
sciences: but that does not mean Peirce demonstrated this that the category of
the individual would attain the right to existence in the logic of research.)
The exclusion of the individual is not at all suspicious. It is part and parcel of
the concept of calculation or law that dominates the hypothetico-deductive proce-
dure of the exact sciences. In contrast to perceptions, which, according to the
362 U LECTURE 23
classical view, immediately relate to individual things, recognitions are mediate.
To be sure, they also refer to things, yet only "by means of a feature which several
[and in the case of pure concepts, all] things may have in common."
3
Representa-
tions (Vorstellungen) that are determined by the consciousness of their unity, and
therewith elevated to the status of knowledge, are precisely thereby combined ac-
cording to a rule. What is known once will, therefore, behave in exactly the same
way under comparable conditions as it did the first time, and each feature that
deviates from identity for this reason becomes irrelevant for knowledge.
Repeatability with identical form and meaning-i.e., iteration without loss of
semantic identity is essential to the object of knowledge. If, for example, the
linguist examines the grammar of a linguistic community, he or she makes an in-
ventory of the universal rules that govern the set of statements as categorical units
of order (i.e., "types") and that make manageable schemes out of its elementary
components; these can be reproduced and communicated in different speech situ-
ations without serious loss of meaning (each communication presupposes a dupli-
cation of meaning into that of the sender and that of the receiver: this duplication
does not stand in contradiction to the identity of the message, but rather makes
it into what Saussure calls a "social fact").
The individual, in contrast, is, simply according to the etymology of the word,
the unpartable (das Unteilbare), and thus the unimpartable (das Unmitteilbare).
It is not indivisible in the sense of the classical model of the atom, where it is a
matter of the indivisibility of an infinitesimally small substance that entertains re-
lations "only" with itself (species infima)\ rather the individual is "indivisible" in
the sense that it exists without a double and therefore without reference, and thus
it literally has no equals. Individuality would be the mode of Being of a being
without internal otherness and which refuses to obey the law of iterability (ht-
eros, alter, ander, autre are based on the same Indo-European root as iterum).
The ideas of sameness and repeatability are by no means mutually exclusive in
European grammar: they refer to each other. Even the speculative thought of
reflecting oneself in the Other adheres to an old Western linguistic convention.
"Everything that follows," Derrida says, "may be read as the exploitation of the
logic which links repetition to alterity" (Margins, 315).
The individual has to be strictly distinguished from the particular, which is al-
ways subsumed under the general as a case is subsumed under a rule. Although
there were constantly attempts to differentiate both concepts (for example, by Gil-
bert of Poitier and by Richard of Saint Victor), classical philosophy since antiq-
uity has always insisted that the particularity of the individual can be continuously
derived from the general. To be sure, that means that the acknowledged "incom-
mensurability" of the individuals with regard to each other has its limitations; in-
dividuals are according to the doctrines, for example, of Saint Thomas Aquinas
and of Leibnitz, who agree on this point centered on God and can communicate
LECTURE 23 363
with one another by means of God- i.e., by means of common participation in
the esse commune.
Thus it is not logical incommensurability that has the last word but rather the
symbolic representation of unity in the individuals: taken together they represent
the universe.
4
Leibnitz's infinitesimal calculation finally eliminates the gulf be-
tween the universal concept and the species infima with rigorous scientific means
by demonstrating that the individual can be derived from the general through a
process of infinite gradation: both are of the same nature, and no dialectic takes
place between them. This is the thesis that the universal and the singular are of
the same species (with the characteristic implication that the individual is a "spe-
cies," even if only of the smallest sort). Godthe highest genus has a priori the
concept of all individuals at his disposal.
Can one say that this premise, which is just as binding for Fichte's and Hegel's
systems as it is, mutatis mutandis, for the natural sciences, constitutes the concept
of science as such and in general? That, at least, is Schleiermacher's view. In a
little-known tradition which in relation to the official metaphysical tradition one
might call heretical he does not consider the individual as a place of fullness,
an unerodible kernel of self-identity, and above all a being that could be derived
from a rational ideal by means of processes of deduction. On the contrary, the
individual feeling (i.e., the familiarity of an existing individual with itself) is the
"complement" of a constitutive "lack" inside of each self-consciousness, even the
highest one.
5
It "supplies" and "supplements" the "missing unity" of that move-
ment in which the individual self-consciousness attempts to represent the univer-
sal condition of truth in itself.
6
The lacuna that separates it from the fullness of
(the Hegelian) concept, and denies it the identity of an originary and complete
self-presencing, causes the individual self to be "open for the totality of the other-
than-us (Ausser-uns)"
1
In other words, the absence of a natural signification that
would define it in its essence once and for all forces the individual to turn to in-
terpretation; it has to project its meaning anew in every moment and will never
dissolve the alternating perspectives, in which its own Being and the Being of the
world present themselves to it, "into an identical thinking and eliminate all
differences."
8
In this way the individual becomes the transcendental condition for meaning
and understanding: it establishes the significations through the exchange of which
communication and intersubjectivity become possible. Yet among these significa-
tions there is none that would guarantee a "complete" understanding, i.e., one that
would shake off the "individual component"
9
and which thereby would finally re-
present (there can be no representation without prior presence). Anything that
once comes into contact with individuality eludes the claim of universality and
verifiability, at least to the extent that "truth" is conceived as "readequation, or
reappropriation as desire to plug the hole."
10
The truth (of symbolic orders) is,
so to speak, hollow. In its heart a hole, as it were, is hollowed out, and this hole
364 LECTURE 23
consumes its identity and finality. It is precisely for this reason that the "true" (in
the sense of "final") significance of the universal is uncertain: it remains relative
to all those interpretations that can be made about it and that are fundamentally
infinite. The cause of this is individuality, which interprets every codified con-
cept in a scientific or linguistic system in a manner that is particular to it itself;
the concept is displaced and, perhaps, nonidentically reexternalized. The univer-
sal concepts or significations,
11
Sartre similarly says,
are only quasi-significations and the set of them taken as a whole con-
stitutes only a quasi-knowledge, first because they are elected as the
means of meaning and are rooted in meaning (in other words, they are
constituted on the basis of style, are expressed by style and, as such,
are blurred from the beginning), and then because, in and of them-
selves, they appear to be, as it were, detached from the universal by a
singularity.
12
As soon as the individual surfaces in the symbolic order, the recursivity of the
linguistic types (stressed by Searle) is endangered: no one guarantees that two
uses of one and the same sign leave its former signification intact. The iterability
of signs does not guarantee their permanence and identity, but rather provides
them with an index of uncontrollable transformation. For scientific thinking this
is quite a problem: the individual as opposed to the particular, which always re-
mains masterable by the universal, as an instance is by its rule-is eliminated, as
it were, from the universe of "knowable," "significant" propositions, and thus
from the universe of propositions that are identical with themselves (within a
differential order). Therefore, no knowledge but the conscious position of not-
knowing is adequate to it, and it appeals semiologically to the "nonsignifying
element."
13
For this reason, Sartre calls the hermeneutics that attempts to deci-
pher the individual moment in each sign use on this side of the rules for its codi-
fication, as it were, a "hermeneutics of silence" {une hermneutique du silence)}*
Ever since there have been rules for the formation of scientific discourse, i.e.,
since Parmenides at the latest, the individual - insofar as it is not being in the em-
phatic sense has consequently been under thought prohibition. Only with reason
{noein) can one grasp what is universal, present, self-referential, determined in
its Being, and unequivocally distinguished from all other beings: in other words,
that which can be signified. Whatever lacks one of these criteria is not, i.e., it
cannotin the etymological sense of the Greek verb noein-be perceived (the
German words Vernunft [reason] and vernehmen [to perceive] are related, just
as the Greek words nous and noein are); whatever cannot be perceived or em-
braced by reason also cannot be inscribed in a symbolic order (that of thought,
speech, theoretical behavior in the broadest sense). According to such a theoreti-
cal premise, any preference for the nongeneralizable, i.e., for nonbeing relations
LECTURE 23 365
(m onto), must simply appear to be insane: it must appear to be a disposition
closely related to idiocy.
It is worthwhile to ask about the origin of this concept, which Sartre takes up
in the title of his Idiot de la famille, and which recurs like a leitmotif throughout
his Flaubert. It signals an appeal to the early Western concept of the human being
as the immediately "social creature." In contradiction to the schematic and un-
differentiating reconstruction of European intellectual history of which neostruc-
turalism is guilty, one has to insist that the feature of the "singular" (Eigenen) and
"particular" (Eigentumlichen) (to idiou in Greek) was never an outstanding trait
of what the Greeks called logos and the Scholastics ratio. "Logocentrism" by no
means implies a cult of the "singular" {Eigenen). Both this concept, and the related
one of the private (to idiori), on the contrary, carry the mark of a deprivation (str-
asis, privatio): only to a certain extent are they beings, m onta, creatures that
lack truth and the full presence of idea. Over against the public-universal (to
koino) the realm of that which is bound by "laws" (nomoi) the individual and
its particularity (Eigentumlichkeit) were always deprecatingly assessed (all words
in Greek that are combined with the root idio have a deprecatory meaning). The
laws (hoi nomoi), to be sure, as things established by convention, are revocable
(which makes them comparable to hypothetically induced statements of laws in
the sciences), but this is by no means true for the thought of regularity or of justice
as such.
Plato and Aristotle, of course, do not completely veil the hiatus that separates
the universality and exclusivity of the law from the particularity of the situations
in which it is applied.
I5
These situations are themselves m nta in their for-itself.
Yet both Plato and Aristotle know a sure measure for the identification of the true
citizen: he/she immediately recognizes his/her private matter as a public issue,
i.e., as a fact that is subject to regularities. This is what distinguishes the true citi-
zen from the private person, from the idits.
One could jokingly say but not without concrete evidence that the in-
dividual in our culture is born to play the role of the idiot. This will not change
in the least as long as science upholds the instituted identity in meaning between
Being and universality and allows only those deviations from universality that,
like the particular, can be derived from it in deductive steps without altering its
essence. Sartre not only alludes to this in the title of his Idiot de la famille; he
explicitly reminds us at several points of the Parmenidean and Platonic tradition
of the proscription of the individual, a tradition that continues to exist both in the
bourgeois and in the socialist systems of society, as well as in the theoretical atti-
tude that supports them and that produces those "objective neuroses," which, as
symptoms of illness, silently manifest the origin of this proscription.
But what if the individual is not the being-itself (auto to on)l What then? It
must be a feature of being, and, in fact, one on the basis of which being comes
to its determinedness. All determination is grounded in a negation (omnis deter-
366 LECTURE 23
minatio est negatio). Can one presume that it is the exclusion of the individual,
of the nonsignifying element from the "signifying set," by means of which the or-
der of the universal is established and simultaneously the nullity (Sartre says
ngatit) of the ideal ground for this order is explained? In this case the individual
would be the ground that is not itself (der nicht selbst seiende Grund) (or the ideal
ground) for the distinction of being as a universal context of references and as-
signments in a life world; and it would be through this that the human beings of
a given society mediate their communal self-understanding as socialized subjects
(individus communs, as Sartre says). The individual would thus be ratio cog-
noscendi of this order. For the moment, let's recognize that there are at least three
features that connect the individual, defined in the way stated earlier, with Der-
rida's differance: both are conditions of possibility for the subsistence of social
or symbolic orders; both establish these orders by subtracting themselves from
what they themselves have established; and both are pure nullities (Verneint-
heiten) without a kernel of self-identity and positivity.
Now repetition is defined by Deleuze in a manner very similar to this, and that
seemed to me to justify the detour by way of Schleiermacher and Sartre.
Diffrence et rptition also develops its theoretical approach in direct con-
tradiction to science's opting for the universal and, more specifically, in con-
tradiction to the type-token distinction of the grammatical code model.
Here are the first sentences of the introduction to Diffrence et rptition:
Repetition is not generality. Repetition must be distinguished from
generality in several ways. Any formula implying confusion between
the two is disturbing, as when we say that two things resemble each
other like two peas in a pod; or when we identify "the only science is
the science of the general" and "the only science is the science of what
is repeated." Between repetition and resemblanceeven when the latter
is extremethere is a difference in kind.
Generality presents two great orders: the qualitative order of resem-
blances and the quantitative order of equivalences. Cycles and equalities
are the symbols of these orders. But in any case, generality expresses a
point of view according to which one term can be exchanged for an-
other, and one term substituted for another. The exchange or substitu-
tion of particulars defines our conduct corresponding to the generality.
That is why empiricists are not wrong to present the general idea as a
particular idea in itself, on the condition that there be added to this a
feeling that it could be replaced by any other particular idea that resem-
bles it in regard to a word. Conversely, it is clear that repetition is a
necessary and founded conduct only in relation to what cannot be
replaced. Repetition as conduct and as a point of view concerns an un-
exchangeable, unsubstitutable singularity. Reflections, echoes, doubles,
and souls are not in the province of resemblance or equivalence; and
LECTURE 23 367
just as there is no substitution possible between true twins, there is no
possibility of exchanging one's soul. If exchange is the criterion of
generality, theft and the bestowal of gifts are the criteria of repetition.
There is thus an economic difference between the two. (DR, 7)
Let's try to get our bearings in Deleuze's thoughts. What first strikes us is that
repetition and universality are conceived as opposites. That can be understood in
only one way: repetition differs from universality in that it does not repeat the
same. If science, for the sake of the uniformity of its rules and the identity of
meaning of its signs, defines repetition according to the law of equivalent ex-
change, then there is, in the sense of this definition, no science that deals with
that which cannot be exchanged equivalently: a singular soul, for example, as
Deleuze rather romantically notes. (Think of the fairy tale about the heart that is
exchanged for money in Hauffs Wirtshaus im Spessart.)
16
We must recall what
we were able to ascertain at the beginning of our lecture series about the struc-
turalist law of transformation. It functions precisely in the sense of an equivalence
of one and the same valeur linguistique that is filled in each instance by entirely
different semantic-phonetic elements. The common feature of an exchange value
(for example, the value of a coin: money is, after all, "the universal equivalent,"
as Marx says) and a word-signa linguistic typeis, as Saussure understood
very well, their indifference with regard to the individual phonic or physical real-
ity of what they are exchanged for. Just as for five francs I can buy a ticket from
Geneva to Nyon, or a paperback book, or even several candy bars, the word-sign
can designate an arbitrary number of objects or states of affairs of the same value.
Here as in political economy we are confronted with the notion of
value; both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of
different orderslabor and wages in one and a signified and a signifier
in the other. (CGL, 79)
To reduce an object or a chain of sounds to its value means to abstract radically
from their sensual characteristics. Individuality also belongs to these sensual
characteristics (which, as we saw earlier, presents itself not to the concept but
to perception, according to the classical view). Only this act of abstraction founds
the sign (or the commodity, or the "universal commodity," money) as something
that can be repeatedly employed and exchanged without its losing in signification
or value (the word stands for that which it signifies if one disregards the individual
character of the signified). If this abstraction were not accomplished, then in lin-
guistics (to remain in this sphere) one would have to reckon with the fact that nei-
ther the phonic chains nor the significations of a word would remain identical
from one linguistic utterance to the next: the (scientifically masterable) system of
language would collapse. This consequence, which would be devastating for lin-
368 G LECTURE 23
guistics, was brought out very nicely by Tullio de Mauro in his introduction to
the vulgate version of Saussure's Cours.
The point of departure of Saussure's reflections is the acute awareness
of the absolute, unique individuality of each expressive act, which he
calls parole. He asks his students to notice an individual who is speak-
ing and who exclaims: "War, I tell you, war!" We spontaneously verify
that the speaker has repeated the word "war" two times. That is true,
but it is only true in a certain sense. If we are interested in the concrete
and effective "psychological" content (to use Saussure's term) that "war"
communicates each time, or rather the concrete phonic act by which
"war" is realized in each instance, we are confronted by something
different each time. One person, on saying "war," will have in mind a
great deal of fanfare, glorious parades, flags blowing in the wind; an-
other, a killed brother or a destroyed home; von Clausewitz will think
at length about politics utilizing other means, and the soldier Schweik
will think about words that out of decency we cannot record here. But
Saussure means that if the same word is repeated twice, even by the
same person and in the same discourse, two different things will be
communicated: "War, I tell you, war!" And the concrete pronunciation
will be no less different each time, even when-there is no room for
doubt-the word is pronounced by the same person. . . . The same
word, repeated in the discourse of the same person, has a different exe-
cution from one moment to the next: if no detail is really taken in ab-
straction, the precise meaning, in its concrete reality, will appear from
one manifestation to the next as if it were formed of different associa-
tions and emotive resonances; and the real phonie, if one considers it as
an effective whole, has inflections and nuances that are different each
time. Only Croce has insisted forcefully enough on the individual,
unique character of the particular expressive act. But what is for Croce
an end point is for Saussure a point of departure.
17
We know how Saussure proceeded (and we will return to this later). But at this
point we can already make the observation that the original nonidentity of the con-
cepts mentaux, which call forth the linguistic expressions in different speakers,
and the phonic elements during different executions can only hypothetically be
escaped: by operations of that process of abstraction that takes different occur-
rences of sound images as the occasion for an interpretation that relates these
sound images to a common meaning, and thus considers them as values and no
longer as acoustic bodies. In the final section of this lecture series we will inves-
tigate how this happens, according to Saussure's theory, and particularly to what
extent even for him the moment of individuality is preserved in this hypothetical
interpretation that constitutes the identity of the signs.
For Deleuze, at least, this thought is a fundamental one and stands not at the
end of his book but rather at the very beginning. "Repetition is not generality"
LFCTURE23 369
was his first sentence. Universality was characterized as the end product of
processes of abstraction that identify individually incomparable things by means
of their value, i.e., quantitatively by means of equivalence. There is, as Deleuze
emphasizes, another procedure: "the qualitative order of resemblances." Here
one does not totally abstract from the substantial makeup of things, but rather
from that which qualitatively distinguishes them. What remains then as their
smallest common feature (of quality) is that which they all have in common their
similarity.
That is trivial. But what is not at all trivial is Deleuze's assertion that repetition
belongs neither to the one nor to the other order of universals, whereas for Searle
the repeatability of linguistic types was precisely the certifying authority, the
touchstone of their semantic identity, i.e., of their transtemporal universality. To
be able to hold on to this view, one has to acknowledge the procedure of abstrac-
tion (which Saussure also employs) as essentially justified, and that is precisely
what Deleuze does not do, if I understand him correctly. For him there is no guar-
antee that a reiterated word or a repeated gesture, etc., manifests one and the
same universal.
To repeat is to behave, but in relation to something unique and singular
that has no likeness or equivalent. (DR, 7)
It is not as though there were no universality of repetition. However, the universal
aspect of repetition, as Deleuze says, is the universal of a structure, and not
of a content. It is generally true one could formulate it in this paradoxical
mannerthat because of the intervention of singularizing repetition nothing that
is universal holds.
We are thus opposing generality, as the generality of the particular, and
repetition as the universality of the singular. (8)
I do not know whether the terminological distinction between "the generality of
the particular" and "the universality of the singular" is an especially appropriate
one. On the other hand, we see that Schleiermacher's and Sartre's distinction be-
tween the particular and the singular resurfaces here. The particular is what, as
one case among other cases (of the same value), is subsumed under a general rule
or a universal concept; the individual, on the other hand, is what has no equals
and to this extent does not fall under the rule or the concept.
The formulation "that has no likeness or equivalent" is Deleuze's. It stands in
a similarly contradictory relation to philosophy's concept of individuality as does
the concept of individuality proposed by Schleiermacher and Sartre. Far from be-
ing something like a kernel of personal identity in the flux of time (and thus some-
thing persistent or permanent), the individual for Schleiermacher, Sartre, and
Deleuze is the absolutely nonrepeatable: it is that whose intervention deprives all
universal orders of their identity and closure. Individuality is at the same time the
370 LECTURE 23
opponent of a mechanical conception of communication (A communicates B to
C; both partners conceive of the same thing under B). On the contrary, the in-
dividual is, in the original sense of the word, the un/?<2rfable and un/mpartable (un-
TEILbar und unMITteilbar), or "unsharable," which covers both meanings. Not
in the sense of the classical model of the atom as the indivisibility of an in-
finitesimally small substance that entertains relations "only" with itself; rather as
that which exists without an internal double and therefore without reference, and
which, as a result, literally (as Deleuze says) has no equals and consequently es-
capes the criterion ofiterability with identical meaning (and thus also the criterion
of the "ideal objectivity" of the propositional statement, of the "intention of a
proposition," which can be identically reproduced in an infinite number of formu-
lations). To formulate an individual utterance and to reproduce it in the act of
reading (i.e., to recreate it) under these conditions, does not mean (and I consider
this the decisive factor) to articulate the same linguistic chain once again (and
with an identical meaning), but rather to undertake another articulation of the
same linguistic chain. For "one can never produce the same thing once again,"
as August Boeckh says.
18
Robert Musil expresses the same opinion when he calls
"the individual something absolutely unique," something "nonfixable . . . , in-
deed anarchical," which "does not allow for repetition." If one talks about it, then
this occurs "in the knowledge that no word can be spoken twice without altering
its meaning."
19
Wilhelm von Humboldt has pointed out what is responsible for this: in each
situation of linguistic communicationeven in the special cases of self-com-
munication and communicating by means of texts two modes of conceptualiza-
tion (Vorstellungsweisen) clash with each other, of which only the conventional
parts will overlap, whereas "the more individual parts jut beyond."
20
There can
be no absolute coinciding "in an unsharable point," for each communication that
is mediated by signs or texts provides a historically unstable merging of the
universal with an individual viewof the universal; this view of the universal, how-
ever, cannot be universal itself. The effort to communicate would attain objec-
tivity only under the condition that one would be able to control its meaning from
an Archimedean point beyond language; but we are once and for all entangled
in linguistic occurrences whose untransparency arises from the fact that the rules
discourse dictates to us always subsist "at the mercy of the future."
21
The synchronic law is general but not imperative. Doubtless it is im-
posed on individuals by the weight of collective usage . . . , but here
I do not have in mind an obligation on the part of speakers. I mean that
in language no force guarantees the maintenance of a regularity when
established on some point. . . . And the arrangement that the law
defines is precarious. (CGL, 92)
LECTURE 23 D 371
Precisely because the law of language reflects only an actual state of collective
speech and is not imperative, each speech act is not only reproductive but creative
in a systematically uncontrollable way. Individual style always shakes the sign
synthesis that connects writing (or spoken word) with meaning; it always dis-
places the limits of normality that were valid up to that point (but which were not
compulsory). Even if one understands this or that in an utterance, innumerable
possibilities for meaning remain unexhausted, and, Schleiermacher says, "as long
as even only one such possibility is not absolutely dismissed, we cannot speak of
a necessary insight" into the semantic structure of the statement or the text (HuK,
317).
This productivity of every repetition that is added by the "individual element"
(Saussure, EC, I, 286) of language (langue) in its universality is by no means
mysterious. Indeed, it is analytically true that whatever works toward the modi-
fication of a general rule cannot be brought into view from the perspective of this
rule. If, however, an individuality interpretively intervenes on the basis of a use
of a linguistic term (or a speech act executed according to rules), dividing the
value of this term or utterance and reexternalizing it nonidentically to the system,
then it is clear that the individual could not have been derived from the universal.
Already Humboldt and Schleiermacher emphasized that the individual and in-
novative moment of language use comes to the fore in poetic discourse as such
(see, for example, HuK, 405), whereas it appears repressed in scientific discourse
(see HuK, 139). Deieuze differentiates in a similar manner.
It is rightly said that there are two languages: the language of the
sciences, dominated by the symbol of equality, and in which each term
can be replaced by others; and lyric language, of which each irreplacea-
ble term can only be repeated. Repetition can always be "represented"
as an extreme resemblance or a perfect equivalence. But moving by
degrees from one thing to another does not change the fact that there is
a difference in kind between the two things. (DR, 8)
At this point another concept we already know from Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia is brought into play: it is the concept of "representation." Its mechanism would
consist in identifying nonidentical singularities or individualities in terms of their
value by relating them to a feature they have in common. If one calls the word-
sign a "representation" (as Deieuze does), then one can understand what he
means: the individuality of the word uses that appear in the structure of repetition
can be reduced to a universal by means of abstracting to the sign value.
Representation . . . mediates lived experience by ascribing it to the
form of an identical or similar object. (DR, 29)
That, in very concise form, is what Deieuze has to say about the mechanism of
representation, and the thought appears in a much more convincing form than in
372 D LECTURE 23
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. To represent something means to reduce it either
to a similarity or to an equivalence. This reduction implies an idealization of the
signified that disregards the constantly changing contents of signs, at the price,
to be sure, that the singularity of meaning no longer shows up in what is repre-
sented. This not showing up, however, should not be understood to imply that
representation would have the last word; indeed, it is rather the case that it is al-
ways challenged anew by the nonidentity of repetition.
It is because repetition differs in kind from representation that the
repeated cannot be represented, but must always be signified, masked
by what signifies it, itself masking what it signifies. . . .
If repetition is possible, it stems from miracle rather than the law. It
is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of
the law. If repetition can be found, even in nature, it is in the name of
a power that is affirmed against the law and which works under the
laws, a power that is perhaps above the laws. If repetition exists, it ex-
presses at once a singularity against the general, a universality against
the particular, a remarkable against the ordinary, an instantaneity
against variation, an eternity against permanence. In every respect,
repetition is transgression. It puts the law into question, it denounces its
nominal or general character, in favor of a deeper and more artistic
reality. (29, 9)
It is indeed striking how close to Sartre and Schleiermacher Deieuze is here. And
this sense of proximity is even heightened when one reads that Deieuzein spite
of his equating the synthetic creation of subjectivity with representation-
distinguishes a "true subject of repetition" (DR, 29) from precisely this equalizing
subjectivity. This true subject is distinct from that of the Kantian "synthesis of ap-
perception" in that it is not a principle by virtue of which the diversity of the in-
dividual and the different remains subjugated by means of idealizing abstraction
to a unity that is external to it. The true subject of repetition is rather the element
that in each repetition escapes the hold of the synthesis and displaces its unities.
We can rightfully speak of repetition when we are faced with identical
elements having absolutely the same concept. But from these discrete
elements, from these repeated objects, we must distinguish a secret sub-
ject that is repeated through them, the true subject of the repetition. We
must think repetition in the pronominal, find the Self of repetition, and
the singularity in what is repeated. For there is no repetition without a
repeater, nothing repeated without a repeating soul. For that matter,
rather than the repeated and the repeater, the object and the subject, we
should distinguish two forms of repetition. In any event, repetition is
difference without a concept. But in one case, difference is posited as
external to the concept, a difference between objects represented under
the same concept, falling into the indifference of space and time. In the
LECTURE 23 G 373
other case, difference is internal to the Idea; it is deployed as the pure
creative movement of a dynamic space and time that correspond to the
Idea. The first repetition is the repetition of the Same, which is ex-
plained by the identity of the concept or of the representation; the sec-
ond is the one that includes difference, and is itself included in the al-
terity of the Idea, in the heterogeneity of an "appresentation." One is
negative, due to the lack of a concept, and the other affirmative, due to
the excess of the idea. One is hypothetical, the other categorical. One is
static, the other dynamic. One is repetition in the effect, the other in the
cause. One, in extension, the other, intensive. One ordinary, the other,
remarkable and singular. One is horizontal, the other vertical. One is
developed, explained; the other is enveloped, and must be interpreted
(etc.). (36)
This passage is noteworthy within the context of our discussion for several
reasons. First, because it does not absolutely identify as opposed to Anti-
Oedipusthe order of representation with that of subjectivization or Oedipaliza-
tion; rather, and this is the second point, it emphasizes a "true (individual) sub-
ject" that does not work in the service of the identity and permanence of represen-
tation, a subject that also receives the romantic designation of "soul." Third,
Deleuze establishes a certain dialectic between the uniformity of the universal and
the transgressivity of the individual; this dialectic operates in such a manner that
the universal se//breaks down to that extent to which the individual is internal
to it. This last consequence is not drawn in the most decisive way, for the adjunc-
tion of two types of repetition, one that displaces the unity of the concept and one
that does not displace it, has to give the impression (which prevails in Capitalism
and Schizophrenia) that it is fundamentally possible to conceive of a concept that
would prove to be resistant to repetition.
Deleuze, as I already mentioned, is not completely unequivocal on this point.
On the one hand, he assures us:
The two repetitions are not independent. One is the singular subject, the
heart and the interiority of the other, the depth of the other. The other
is only the external envelope, the abstract effect. . . . Everywhere the
Other [is hidden] in the repetition of the Same. (37)
On the other hand, the metaphor of the "external envelope," used to describe the
effect of abstraction that transforms the singular subject into a concept (into a
representation), still allows room for the interpretation that this concept could ex-
ist as "the other" of the unrepeatable singular subject, i.e., that it could exist in
a certain autonomy.
Nevertheless, in Difference et rptition there are points at which the thought
of a subject identical with itself (as concept) begins to be challenged as such. I
want to present these points only briefly, since, with regard to the notion they de-
374 LECTURE 23
velop about the subject in classical philosophy, they are completely consistent
with the ideas of Lacan and Derrida.
Where he comments, for example, on Descartes's and Kant's cogito, Deleuze
conceives of the subject in terms of a relation of reflection: "the subject can now
represent to itself its own spontaneity only as that of an Other" (82). We saw that
already Fichte did not (any longer) conceive of the subject in this manner, but
Deleuze takes as little notice of more recent theories of self-consciousness as do
the neostructuralists as a whole. And Deleuze can easily prove of the subject, con-
ceived in this way, that it can only lay claim in the form of a postulate to the
criterion by virtue of which it identifies the two moments in the dyad of reflection
as two sides of the same thing.
The unicity and identity of the divine substance are in truth the sole
guarantor of the one and identical Self, and God is preserved as long as
the Self is kept. (81)
With Kant's attack on rational theology, even the unity of this God (who guaran-
tees the unity of the self) is in danger of collapsing, so that the dividedness of the
I that relies on Him as the guarantor of its identity becomes a scarcely solvable
problem.
For when Kant contests rational theology, he introduces at the same
time a sort of imbalance, a fissure or crack, an alienation of right, in-
surmountable by right, in the pure Self of the / think: the subject can
now represent to itself its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and
by this means invoke in the last instance a mysterious coherence that
excludes its own coherence, that of the world and that of God. Cogito
for a self that has been dissolved: the Self of the / think carries within
its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which, already, I is
an other. (82)
In other words, since it is no longer capable of identifying itself either by virtue
of its own power, or on the certainty of divine guarantee, the I completely loses
its identity (and experiences itself as unpreconceivably altered). (Here I am dis-
regarding the fact-we discussed it at an earlier pointthat this view fails to come
to terms even on the descriptive level with the phenomenon of our factual
familiarity with ourselves: the factual subsistence of our experience of unity
speaks for the postulation of a transcendental unity; at this point the undialectical
universal ization of difference over unity, which we observed in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, appears in this work for the first time.)
Be that as it may, Deleuze believes that even in the case of Kant himself differ-
ence successfully prevailed over the identifying operation of representation or of
reflection. He cites a further event that deepened the division of the I in Kant's
philosophy over against the one in Descartes: the discovery of temporality (DR,
LECTURE 23 D 375
116ff.), which distributes the two moments of the dyad of reflection over two
different positions in time, and which thus makes them exist in a condition of non-
simultaneity to themselves. (According to what Deleuze tells us about this, how-
ever, it cannot be valid for the transcendental I, but only for the I of "internal
meaning." But let's ignore this weakness in Deleuze's argument.)
Then begins a long inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of
intimate meaning. . . .
Through and through the I is, as it were, traversed by a crack: it is
cracked by the pure and empty form of time. . . .
. . . the death of God does not allow the identity of the I to subsist,
but institutes and interiorizes in it an essential dissimilarity, a "de-mark"
rather than the mark or the seal of God. (116, 117)
Before we can even formulate an objection or an addendum, Deleuze himself al-
ready makes the observation that it is German romanticism, in particular Holder-
lin, "that discovers the void of pure time, and, in this void, at once the continued
abduction of the divine, the prolonged crack in the I, and the passion constitutive
of the Self (118). (What Deleuze does not say is that Holderlin developed a very
complicated theory that seeks to illuminate the experiential subsistence of I-ness
in the state of its manifest dividedness in reflection; i.e., he by no means wants
to sacrifice one for the other.)
Nevertheless, one cannot simply say that Deleuze overlooked the problem that
occurs when one grants autonomy to differentiality at the expense of unity. In the
next lecture I will demonstrate how he experiments with the thought (borrowed
from Heidegger),
that difference is in itself articulation and link, that it relates the differ-
ent to the different, without any mediation by the identical or the simi-
lar, the analogue or the opposite. There has to be a differentiation of
difference, an in-itself as a differentiater, a Sich-unterscheidendefs], by
which the different finds itself assembled at the same time, instead of
being represented on the condition that there be a prior resemblance,
identity, analogy, or opposition. (154)
Lecture 24
In Diffrence et rptition we came across the following conceptual construction:
in and of itself repetition does not submit to the law of universality. Repeated
events (vnements I tokens) are not necessarily instances that reproduce the
universal rule; rather, they are singularities that, in the act of application, simul-
taneously transgress and incalculably alter the concept under which they come
forward. To a thinking intent on systematization, this characteristic of repetition
must appear a particular nuisance, and representation is the means by which the
system attempts to integrate deviation. A representation idealizes or abstracts the
individuality of singular events up to the point at which (qualitatively or quantita-
tively) common aspects come to the fore that can be attributed to an essentially
unlimited number of singular data as predicates. The agent of this abstraction or
idealization is the ego: as the synthesis of the multiplicities of occurrences, it
identifies what is by nature nonidentical (i.e., it subjugates it to the external unity
of a concept; see especially DR, 176ff., 189).
Our question was, Is this synthesis by the ego successful, or is Deleuze able
to show that the transcendental synthesis of apperception is actually only an ap-
parent identification or subsumption of the irreducible individuality of the ex-
periential?
We learned on this basis that Deleuze, like one segment of the metaphysical
tradition, orients himself around the model of self-consciousness as reflection: the
ego is familiar with its essence by means of its representation, by means of its
specular double (in contrast to the individual, which exists without an internal or
specular double, sans semblable, i.e., irreflectively). Conceived as the relation
376
LHCTURE24 U 37/
of two elements with each other, the ego is confronted with the peculiar difficulty
of being in need of a criterion (transgressing the inwardness of its self-relation)
that permits the identification of the two distinctive moments. Deleuze tells us that
for Descartes this criterion still consisted in the "divine guarantee." With his at-
tack on rational theology (and metaphysics in general), however, Kant destroys
this criterion (for, if it existed, it would be transcendent to human reason, "over-
excessive" [uberschwanglich]); from this it follows that the unity of reason be-
comes a mere requirement (a postulate). But we are by no means conscious of
our familiarity with ourselves as a mere hypothesis: even if the self is not ade-
quately given to itself, it remains an apodictic certainty. From this one could con-
clude that the model of reflection is inappropriate to the experiential subsistence
of self-consciousness. But precisely this conclusion is not drawn by Deleuze. He
considers self-consciousness a special case of the interreferentiality of two ele-
ments (and thus as a relation of reflection) about which, to be sure, he wants to
prove that no (either hypothetical or factual) identity suppresses the differential
moment inherent to every repetition: every reflection would thus be a nonidenti-
cal mirroring.
Deleuze finds the beginnings for an insight into this situation in Kant himself
and in the romantic philosophers. In Kant to the extent that, in his chapter on
schematism in his Critique of Pure Reason, he conceives the synthesis of self-
consciousness as temporal, and thus as a depresenced relation to itself (as non-
presence with itself: non-prsence soi). In Hlderlin he finds it insofar as
Holderlin at the same time as Novalisemphasized that our consciousness of
familiarity with ourselves cannot be obtained from the differences of the relation
of reflection as such: either one takes difference to be real (in which case the
chance to view it as the manifestation of a grounding unity vanishes), or one
represses the reality of difference and thereby loses the possibility of maintaining
a cognitive (erkennende) reference to unity.
1
Yet we do have consciousness of
ourselves; we therefore have to postulate a prereflective unity, which is simul-
taneously conscious, as the basis of the relation of reflection. What this might
look like has not yet been satisfactorily illuminated in theory.
Deleuze reflects upon whether our self-consciousness cannot be explained on
the basis of the occurrence of differentiation itselfwithout transcendental re-
course to a founding unity. Difference not only separates but also similar to the
"articulation" of the phonic masses establishes connections and proximities
(DR, 154), but these are of a sort that do not obey the law of subsumption of what
is repeated under the universal or the identical.
As for these instances [resemblance, identity, analogy, opposition],
once they cease to be conditions, they are no longer anything but effects
of the first difference and its differentiation, global or surface effects
that characterize the denatured world of representation, and which ex-
378 G LECTURE 24
press the way in which the in-itself of difference hides itself in giving
rise to what covers it over. (DR, 154)
I shall skip over what Deleuze says about a possible system of "differentially stra-
tified intensities" in order to put my finger on the more fundamental problem,
which Deleuze himself articulates in the following way:
Under what . . . conditions does difference develop this in-itself as a
"differentiater," and assemble the different beyond all possible represen-
tation? . . . The major difficulty remains: is it indeed difference that
relates the different to the different in these intensive systems? Does the
difference of difference relate difference to itself with no other inter-
mediary? When we speak of putting things in touch with each other,
heterogeneous series, coupling, and resonance, do we not do so on the
condition that there be a minimum of resemblance between the series,
and identity in the agent that brings about the communication? (154,
156)
In other words, is it possible for different series (for example, sign chains), to
which we can attribute the character that they are repetitions of each other, to be
brought into relation to each other at all without having recourse to "the identity
of a third"as the criterion for the reference of that which philosophy calls its
"ground of relation"?
Deleuze responds with a metaphor that he then loads with a considerable bur-
den of proof.
The lightning strikes between different intensities, but it is preceded by
an invisible, intangible, somber precursor, which determines its reverse
path in advance, in negative outline as it were. In the same way, every
system contains its somber precursor that ensures communication be-
tween the border series. . . .
But in any case it is a matter of knowing how the precursor exer-
cises this role. It is not doubtful that there is an identity of the precur-
sor, and a resemblance between the series that it puts in touch with
each other. But this "there is" remains completely undeter-
mined. . . . Identity and resemblance would then be nothing more
than inevitable illusions, that is, concepts of reflection that [retrospec-
tively] would account for our inveterate habit of thinking of difference
on the basis of the categories of representation, but doing so because
the invisible precursor would hide both itself and its functioning, and at
the same time would hide the in-itself as the true nature of difference.
(156-57).
Thisaporetically named somber precursor displays, as we see, great similari-
ties both to Derrida's diffrance, as well as to Lacan's "true subject," conceived
as that which "subtracts itself from the phenomena of meaning it itself brings to
LECTURE 24 D 379
light: "there is no other place than the one in which it is 'missing,' no other identity
than the one in which it is missing" (157). The "invisible precursor" has in com-
mon with Kant's transcendental subject that it,steps into the background for the
benefit of those phenomena it brought to light. But the characteristic of possessing
identity only in the form of a lack (manqu), and thereby eluding the law of reflec-
tion and its semiotic fixation as representamen (Peirce) this characteristic it has
in common with individuality. Individuality too lets meaning appear as something
representor/^, but it itself is not represented in the representamen and is not
representable: for that which is the basis of meaning does not appear as part of
the effect of meaning. And indeed, there is no integrating third element, no
ground of conjunction,
2
which would mediate (intersubjective) signification with
individual meaning; and this is true because meaning cannot be uniformly
repeated. Uniformity of significations, therefore, has to be explained as a sort of
transcendental appearance, as the precipitate of a differential activity that itself
(in its In-itself) does not operate on the level of significations, and which necessar-
ily slips away from its own effects ([qui] se drobe ncessairement sous ses
propres effets),
because it [the somber precursor] is perpetually displaced within itself
and is perpetually disguised in the series. Thus we cannot consider the
identity of a third element and the resemblance of the parts to be a con-
dition for the being and the thought of difference, but only a condition
for its representation, which expresses a denaturing of this being and
this thought, like an optical effect that blurs the true status of the condi-
tions as it is in itself. (157)
All of this is quite transparent. But it does not solve the problem that, within the
framework of a satisfactory theory of self-consciousness, interests us most,
namely, how something like familiarity of consciousness with itself can be gener-
ated beyond nonidentity and "disparity" in repetition. And individuality is distinct
from the singularity of objects precisely in that it is not blind, like the blind
precursor; rather, it is familiar with itself in a way that can nevertheless be distin-
guished from the certainty of reflection and the recursivity of representation; for
it is a matter of the familiarity of something that is nonrepeatable, and thus of
something that is not instantaneous (present).
For this reason we can agree with everything Deleuze negatively says about
the mode of Being of that which cannot be repeated (for example, that all meaning
rests on the fact that an element that itself is nonsignificant forms its ground [DR,
161]). We can even agree with the idea that the individual is different in itself (and
not only different from other things: the incalculability of the contexts into which
it can enter constantly displaces the margins of its previous unity with itself). On
the other hand, the individual is fundamentally distinguished from the somber
presurcor in that it, unlike the metaphor Deleuze uses, is not a natural event (une
380 ' J LECTURE 24
foudre) but rather grounded in a hypothetical judgment. A judgment, a hypothe-
sis: only an individual could pass a judgment or advance a hypothesis. Even if
the coupling of repeated sign chains remains nonidentical here, there is always
a motive for this being conjoined in such and such a way and in no other; and this
motive is the hypothesis that an individual capable of interpretation advances
about the unity of the conjoined elements.
To be sure, Deleuze is correct (and Peirce had had this insight a hundred years
prior to him) in asserting that there is no transcendental criterion available (such
as divine guarantee, for example) that assures the identity of repeated moments.
On the other hand, there is consciousness of connections and there is conscious-
ness (of) consciousness. Thus one could conclude, loosely adapting the basic idea
of Peirce's semiotics, that every inference that interprets the repetition of a sign
or of an event as the repetition of the same is an ampliative inference. An "amplia-
tive inference" designates a nondeductive procedure of inferring. It is nondeduc-
tive because precisely that principle is lacking on the basis of which the unity of
the phenomena connected by the judgment could be derived. It is nevertheless a
founded inference to the extent that this principle survives in the form of a
reasonable demand: it is that in expectation of which every judgment of identity
(and, indeed, any judgment at all) already anticipates its founding. This founding,
to be sure, occurs only provisionally, since it has no criterion for its truth; but
it is provisional in the sense of a well-grounded hypothesis that, although it makes
no claim to uncover the thing-in-itself, still could not be replaced by a better-
founded judgment.
By saying that we draw the inference provisionally, I mean that we do
not hold that we have reached any assigned degree of approximation as
yet, but only hold that if our experience be indefinitely extended, and if
every fact of whatever nature, as fast as it presents itself, be duly ap-
plied, according to the inductive method, in correcting the inferred ra-
tio, then our approximation will become indefinitely close in the long
run.
3
In this sense the inductive-abductive form of inference operates without a prior
criterion for identity, yet it is still not adequately described as a bolt of lightning
that follows the course in the sky that the "somber precursor" prescribes for an
electrical discharge. There is no abductive inference that mediates between the
precursor and the lightning itself, but only a blind natural causality. In contrast
to this, everything that has meaning is motivated; i.e., it is the result of an in-
terpretive hypothesis. To interpret, for its part, presupposes self-consciousness.
And self-consciousness, finally, is, as Dieter Henrich has shown, not an action that
could be described as the identification of something with something else:
4
this,
on the contrary, is rather how the model of reflection, which is not appropriate
for describing the phenomenon of self-consciousness, wants to have it. In truth,
LECTURE 24 D 381
the familiarity of consciousness with itself has to precede, as part of its prior re-
serve of knowledge, any reflection of an activity onto itself. "Familiarity with
consciousness can by no means be understood as the result of an activity. It al-
ways already is present when consciousness occurs."
5
If this is the case, however, then we can confidently hold on to the notion of
self-consciousness, without contradicting what Deleuze says about the noniden-
tity of repetition, on the one hand, and also without contradicting, on the other
hand, the criteria-less conjunction of the different strata of meaning in the wake
of the somber precursor. Familiarity with itself is obviously not a state of affairs
that is subordinate to the criterion of identity. Hence there are reasons to stick
to the opinion that the condition of possibility for the representability of the
world, on the one hand, and for the incessant displaceability of this representa-
tion, on the other (DR, 16), cannot be a preconscious "difference from itself (or
"internal difference," "difference in itself [DR, 157-58]), but that it much rather
is a matter of a thoroughly prereflective (and thus a fortiori predifferential) con-
sciousness. "Predifferential" does not mean "identical." Both identity and differ-
ence, rather, would be "effects" of this prerelational familiarity with itself without
which neither meaning attribution nor meaning displacement would be conceiva-
ble. Projected into the flow of time (and thus into differentially), this familiarity
with itself would conjoin its utterances and sign chains by means of operations
of hypothetical inference in such a way that, on the one hand, every repetition
would carry the index of an alteration, and, on the other hand, the set of all altera-
tions would be taken up into the continuity of a motivated (i.e., nonblind) succes-
sion of interpretations and hypotheses.
6
But even if the hypothetical nature of inference (only postulated by us, by no
means illuminated) comes closer to doing justice to the hermeneutical character
of the formation and identification of signs than the obscure metaphor of a somber
precursor does, we can still totally agree with Deleuze on the descriptive level:
there is no criterion for the identity of a concept, and also none for the continuity
of our self-consciousness; every repetition hence implies the alteration of what
is repeated as an uncontrollable possibility that is hence a priori irrefutable be-
cause it is a structural possibility.
We will also not forget that Deleuzeand as far as I can tell, he is the only
one among the neostructuralists to have done this recognized the significance of
the individual for the process of meaning attribution and meaning transformation,
and that he confirmed this on the basis of lucid phenomenological analyses. To
be sure, it is more the idea of "intensity" that serves him (as well as Jean-Franois
Lyotard) as the key concept for the designation of a prerepresentative entity (or
rather nonentity) that does not obey the law of identity (see, above all, DR, 314ff.;
cf. 343 on the mode of Being of intensity as a jifi ov). Nonetheless, intensity -
whose primary characteristics are the "difference in itself {DR, 325), non-
representativity, and asignificance
7
does not seem to me to be an essential fea-
382 U LECTURE 24
turc of the Being of individuality (although I would prefer to discuss this point
at some other time; for the present, let's simply put it in parentheses without mak-
ing a decision about it). Be that as it may, Deleuze says: "All individuality is inten-
sive" (317), and "difference is intensive" (342). By means of the common charac-
teristic of intensity, an inner bond is thus established between differentiality and
individuality, as we were already able to surmise based on the ideas of Schleier-
macher and Sartre.
What Deleuze has to say about this is indeed quite original. For individuality
is usually considered a nucleus of self-identity that cannot be further divided. That
"the authentic dividual . . . [is] also the authentic individual," is a romantic
thought that stands in contradiction to the conceptual history of this term.
8
And
Deleuze's thoughts similarly stand in contradiction to the history of this concept.
The individual is neither a quality nor an extension. Individuation is
neither a qualification nor a partition, neither a specification nor an or-
ganization. The individual is no more a species infima than a composite
of parts- Qualitative or extensive interpretations of individuation remain
incapable of pinpointing a reason why a quality might cease being
general, or why a synthesis of extent might begin here and end there.
Qualification and specification already presuppose individuals to be
qualified; and extensive parts relate to the individual, rather than the
other way around. But precisely, it is insufficient to mark a difference
in kind between individuation and differentiation in general. This differ-
ence in kind remains unintelligible as long as we do not accept its
necessary consequence: that individuation precedes differentiation by
right, and that all differentiation presupposes an intense field of prior
individuation. It is through the action of the field of individuation that a
given set of differential relations, a given set of remarkable points (the
preindividual field) are actualized. . . . Individuation does not presup-
pose any differentiation, but rather provokes it. (318)
The individual is clearly distinguished from the atom that cannot be further
divided from the final species, which, as particularities, can still be subordinated
to a concept of genus or element (or, in the extreme case, which can be methodi-
cally reconciled with the universal by infinitesimal calculation). Moreover, the
individual is brought into a delimiting relation with differentiality, of the sort that
the former precedes the latter. This reminds us of Sartre, who maintained that
the "nonsignifying element," or the individual, installs the significations that are
different among themselves in their status of Being in the first place, so that one
can say that the significations are projected by the individual and, simultaneously,
that "they appear to be, as it were, detached from the universal by a singularity"
(Situations, VIII, 450) by means of the intervention of an individual. But we could
also think of Saussure, who considers differentiality tobea, to be sure, necessary,
but not a sufficient condition for the formation of meaning, since the articulation
LFXTURE 24 D 383
of the phonic mass leads to the constitution of signs only if one has their possible
meaning in view. That means that the projection of meaning precedes the shaping
of signifiers in a specific sense (or, to formulate it more cautiously, that it pro-
ceeds in tandem with it).
The vocal sound . . . is the instrument of thought . . . without ex-
isting for itself, independently of thought. . . . The vocal sound is not
a word except to the exact, constant extent that a meaning is attached to
it. . . .
On the contrary it is signification that delimits [into units] the words
in the spoken mass. . . . The unit does not preexist. Signification is
what creates it. The units are not there to receive a signification [after
the fact]. (Clearly then, it is meaning that creates the unit). . . .
Thought is what delimits units; sound itself does not delimit them in
advance: there is always a relation with thought. . . . it is always a
matter of the cutting out that thought does in the spoken mass that is
amorphous. . . .
Difference is what makes things meaningful, and signification is
what creates differences, too. (CFS, 15 [1957], 7-8, 41-42, 68, 76)
All these passages, taken from the second Cours of 1908-9, have in common that
they establish a dependence of the formation of difference, which according to
the popular-structuralist view precedes the formation of meaning (which would
boil down to an inverted theory of representation), on the conscious acts of speak-
ing individuals. It is precisely in this sense that Deleuze claims "that individuation
precedes differentiation by right, and that all differentiation presupposes an in-
tense field of prior individuation" (DR, 318).
This priorness, however, should not be conceived as independence, as if the
individual could retain its presemiological identity in its purity over against the
play of differences. On the contrary:
The individual is in no way the indivisible; it is constantly dividing and
changing in nature. (DR, 331)
The individual, by bringing forth signification by means of interpreting it is
simultaneously the agent that alters it; this, too, should be understood in the spirit
of Saussure, who, to be sure, asserted that "forms and grammar exist only so-
cially," but who also added: "but changes arise from the individual" (CFS, 15
[1957], 9). At a later point Saussure specified this and said that no "grammatical
form" whatsoever exists independent of the way in which the individual appropri-
ates it, i.e., interprets it: "A grammatical fact . . . is the pure product of in-
terpretation" (100). And in a formulation even clearer, that is more explicitly her-
mencutical:
384 LI LECTURE 24
Language can be considered as something that, from moment to mo-
ment, is interpreted by the generation that receives it; it is an instru-
ment that people try to understand. The present collectivity does not in-
terpret it at all as the preceding generations have done because, since
conditions have changed, the means for understanding language are not
the same. Therefore there must be the first act of interpretation, which
is active (earlier, one is placed before a mass to be understood, which
is passive). This interpretation will be manifested by the distinctions be-
tween units (this is what all the activity of language results in). (89)
This means, first of all, that langue does not exercise any determination of the
sort realized in individual speech ("nothing guarantees its stability; this order is
at the mercy of the future. No sanction is given"; 72). Second, it means that every
identification of a sign constitutes a hypothetical judgment, namely, an interpreta-
tion that, from the system of langue, cannot be deduced, an interpretation that
takes (understands) the word-hull from generation to generation, indeed, from
speech act to speech act, as an always different sign. Third, it means that each
identification of a sign, to the extent that it is innovative and interpretive, deter-
mines anew the differentiality of the sign-units.
Everything Deleuze says about the mode of Being of individuality would be
reconcilable with Schleiermacher's and Sartre's view, at least to the degree that
Deleuze would attribute a theory of individual self-consciousness to the in-
dividual. But this is precisely what he does not do, because he agrees with the
representational theory of self-consciousness with which he takes issue insofar as
he believes that consciousness fundamentally is constituted as an ego (ichhaft).
A consciousness is nothing without a unifying synthesis, but there is no
unifying synthesis of consciousness without a form of the I and a point
of view of the Ego. What is neither individual nor personal, on the con-
trary, are the emissions of singularities inasmuch as they are made on
an unconscious surface and enjoy an immanent mobile principle of self-
unification through nomadic distribution, which is radically distinct
from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of synthesis of con-
sciousness. Singularities are the true transcendental elements. (LS,
124-25)
In a word, Deleuze does not know any other conception of consciousness than
that of thought (although consciousness covers a larger field than the field of the
acts of thought), and he apparently does not know any other concept of thought
than the Kantian conception, according to which a thought owes its characteristic
uniformity to the synthetic activity of a founding ego. We already know what
Deleuze thinks about this synthesizing action that subjugates the individual to the
schema of a concept. Nevertheless, what he says about the "radical" alternative
LECTURE 24 U 385
of a mobile and nomadic "self-unification" of all singularities remains highly un-
satisfying and indistinct.
This is also true for Diffrence et rptition:
If the problem [of individuation] acquires a particular urgency with psy-
chic systems, it is because it is not at all certain that the Je or the Moi
belongs to the domain of individuation. Rather, they are the figures of
differentiation. (DR, 330)
Je is the name for the formal principle of unification that Kant grasps as the tran-
scendental synthesis of apperception; Moi designates the psychic organism in the
narrower sense. Both are functions in the service of the universalization of in-
dividual events of consciousness in anticipation of their regularity and representa-
bility.
Yet it is very easy to agree with the thesis that the individual's familiarity with
itself is not structured as an ego (ichhaft), without simultaneously having also to
maintain that it is without consciousness. If it is the individual, as the nonsigni-
ficant element, which produces meaning, then it could not possibly be uncon-
scious; an unconscious meaning is a nonthought. But self-consciousness is not
consciousness of an I (whether Je or Moi), but rather consciousness (of) con-
sciousness, which for its part is consciousness o/something that is not conscious
(a state of affairs, for example). This is the reason why we can subscribe to
Deleuze's assertions that
the individuating factors, the implied factors of individuation, thus have
neither the form of the Je nor the substance of the Moi. For the Je is
not separable from a form of identity, nor the Moi from a substance
constituted by a continuity of resemblances. . . . Every individuating
factor, on the other hand, is already a difference, and a difference of
difference. It is constructed on a fundamental disparity, and functions
on the borders of this disparity as such. . . . The individual is in no
way indivisible; it is constantly dividing and changing in nature. It is
not a Moi in what it expresses; for it expresses Ideas as internal mul-
tiplicities, made of differential relations and remarkable points, prein-
dividual singularities. And it is not a Je expression either; for here
again it forms an actualizing muliplicity, a condensation of remarkable
points as it were, an open collection of intensities. (DR, 331)
Although we subscribe to these sentences, we still cannot refrain from demanding
an explanation about the way in which the "undetermined, floating, flowing, com-
municating, enveloping-enveloped" (and not organized as an ego \ichhafi\) in-
dividual has knowledgeof itself (332). This demand has even more weight if one
characterizes individuation as that which is unprethinking ("What cannot be sur-
passed is individuation itself
1
): "unprethinking" in the sense that it is completed
"beyond the moi and the Je" as pre-ego Cprc-moi and prc-Je"), as the itself un-
386 G LECTURE 24
determined ground for all conceivable determination (DR, 332), and in this sense
related to Plato's \ii\ ov, which also is not simply "nothing at all" (ov% co), but
which precedes every affirmation (DR, 343). To be sure, to the extent that even
the singular participates in Being, it becomes urgent that we ask in what way it
is familiar with itself, i.e., how it knows about itself.
But we do not want to follow this line of questioning further at this point (for
it would necessarily go beyond the domain of our question about the essence of
neostructuralism with regard to a general theory of self-consciousness and in-
dividuality). Instead of this, we want to reflect on the position of our argumenta-
tion. Obviously, we have gradually left-most recently, following texts by
Deleuzethe domain of the question about neostructuralism's theory of the sub-
ject and are stepping into the realm in which we want to ask about the neostruc-
turalist theory of meaning. And the question of "meaning" is the third question
we want to address to neostructuralist theory.
In retrospect we can see that the sequence of our questions, outlined for the
purpose of organizing our series of lectures, by no means depicts a merely ex-
ternal order. On the contrary, we have learned that the "archaeology of
knowledge"as a nonhistoricist theory of history anticipates a certain model of
self-consciousness: a model in which, and according to which, the subject can no
longer be conceived as the author of history (or, to speak in more general terms,
as the author of what Heidegger calls the "meaning of Being"). This deautonomi-
zation of subjectivity, in its turn, appeals constantly to a theory of meaning (or
let's say, to a semantics, or, more generally, to a semiology); for it is the insertion
of the subject in always already existing contexts of meaning (contexts of signs,
discourses, institutions, etc.) in whose name this deautonomization occurs. To
understand the subject as an effect of meaning (and not as its author) already im-
plies a thesis about the inescapability of the world of signs. In this thesis all those
questions we decided to direct at neostructuralism converge. Neostructuralism is
essentially language philosophy (a characteristic it shares with its unbeloved rela-
tives, i.e., with analytical philosophy and German hermeneutics); and on the ba-
sis of a theory of language and linguistically mediated formation of meaning, the
neostructuralists inquire about the Being of history and the status of Being of sub-
jectivity. To this extent, the sequence of our questions turns out to be guided by
a certain purpose.
In discussing the problem of the essential impossibility of identical self-
reflection and of repetition with identical meaning theses that are supposed to
shake the belief in a self-consciousness identical with itselfwe are already
standing completely on the ground of sign theory. For, as we know by now, it
is, according to the neostructuralist view, the systematically demonstrated impos-
sibility that a sign can be reiterated without a change in meaning that also ruptures
the subjectunderstood as an effect of meaning and which deprives it of its
prsence--soi. Lacan spoke of an "intrusion of the signifier" that robs the subject
LECTURE 24 387
of its identity; and Derrida, as we recall, talked about the fact that my self-
consciousness is preceded by speech, and that this destroys its character as a prin-
ciple and its coincidence with itself. We thus have to turn to the theory of language
in which, in the last instance, the fates of history and subjectivity will be decided.
Meanwhile, we are no longer uninformed nor uncritical about the arguments
neostructuralism gave us concerning the mode of Being of signs. Let's first recall
that there is a characteristic opposition that separates the neostructuralist from the
analytical critique of meaning. The latter-I am overstating this for the sake of
a first orientation-considers the givenness of consciousness, which in classical
transcendental philosophy was held to be fundamental, to be secondary over
against the more fundamental givenness of meaning; but meaning, in turn, is
defined as a linguistic category that, in addition, connects the mechanism of lan-
guage to the compliance with intersubjectively inviolable rules and conventions.
Neostructuralism, on the other hand, primarily modified substantially the third
of these consequences. For the neostructuralist critique of meaning it is also true
that classical philosophy of consciousness is reformulated and newly grounded
in terms of a theory of signs; on the other hand, doubts arise about the plausibility
of the assertion that language (or, in general, every conceivable system of sym-
bols) can be described-here following Wittgenstein-as "blind compliance with
rules." This phrase suggests that "to mean something with something else (an ex-
pression)" automatically implies that one has to act according to a convention.
One can only say something in a language, and language attributes meaning to
its signs, words, and sentences (which stay typally identical in different applica-
tional situations) by defining these applicational situations themselves as conven-
tional types (for example, as speech acts); that is, it subjugates them to an order
in which a specific applicational situation (a pragmatic context) is allotted to each
expression.
It is precisely this order, as we know, that is no longer guaranteed if one does
not take "language" to be the final foundation of meaning attribution, but rather
submits it to the play of uncontrollable differentiations. "Order" itself then ap-
pears from the outset to be either merely hypothetical and preliminary (from the
perspective of a hermeneutical interpretation of this state of affairs) or undecida-
ble and uncontrollable (from the perspective of Derrida and Deleuze). But in nei-
ther case is language the last foundation of philosophizing; language rests on
something that precedes it and which itself is not subordinate to the category of
meaning, but which rather produces it and deprives it of its identity at the same
time. A nonidentical meaning could, of course, never be conceived as the result
of compliance with a rule; for the distance that separates the identity of the sign
from itself also undermines the rule that underlies its creation and deprives it of
its pertinence.
This, in any case, is the position that Derrida and Deleuze take, each in his
own way. And neither, as I will try to show in our next lecture, develops his views
388 a LECTURE 24
without paying attention to the analytical standpoint, but rather in explicit and
critical confrontation with the so-called speech-act theory, which for its part drew
certain conclusions from the pragmatic turn of language philosophy based on the
work of Peirce and Wittgenstein.
We must begin by acquainting ourselves with the main features that constitute
the predecessorship of Peirce and Wittgenstein. But first let's reconstruct the point
of conjunction. Earlier I pointed out that one of the characteristic traits of
Deleuze's (but also of Derrida's) position is that neither of them lets language
stand-as a conventional or traditional sign orderas an inescapable reality (thus
as a principle of philosophizing): individuality precedes linguistic difference.
(Derrida, for his part, would say that diffrance, the generative movement of ar-
ticulation, precedes the existing system of semiological oppositions and prevents
it from closing itself in any configuration whatever.) To be sure, both Derrida
and Deleuze take issue with the interpretation of individuality or o diffrance as
a "transcendental-philosophical" principle (see L/, 244: "iterability is, however,
not a transcendental condition of possibility"; see also LU 225-26, 234-36). Der-
rida speaks odiffrance as the "arche-trace," which can also be called "ultratran-
scendental," insofar as it also still grounds the classical signification of the "tran-
scendental."
9
The concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and
that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the
logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-
within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we
follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never
constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus be-
comes the origin of the origin. (G/?, 61)
In this hyperbolic overstatement, the meaning of "condition of possibility" is
preserved in such a way that "language" or the symbolic order cannot be the final
quasi-transcendental principles of language philosophy: something, namely
diffrance, precedes them as the transcendental principle of meaning constitution.
The neostructuralist theory of meaning shares this movement of
"exceeding"-at least at first glance-with that branch of analytical philosophy we
know as pragmatism, or, more narrowly, as speech-act theory. Its most important
precursors are, as we know, Charles Sanders Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The former asserted (and Derrida cites him approvingly, even if slightly ab-
breviated in argumentative strength; see G/?, 48ff.) that linguistic signs and ex-
pressions, in order to be able to relate positively or negatively as functions of truth
to states of affairs of empirical reality, must before this be provided with a com-
mentary that allows them this reference to the world. Peirce called this commen-
tary the "interprtant"; it permits the sign to signify by virtue of a hypothetical
inference that, to be sure, can be motivated by earlier sign uses, but cannot be
LECTURE 24 D 389
derived from them. For signs "by nature" have no meaning at all; they acquire
it only and principally by virtue of interpretive ascription. If this is the case, then
the interpretive creation of meaning, which lends a meaning to a given sign
bearer, has to be reestablished from one instance to the next, i.e., from one appli-
cation to the next. To use signs and to understand sign uses thus presupposes ad
infinitum preceding interpretations. Radically simplifying this, one could say that
language is the order it is in each instance only by virtue of an interpretation that
introduces it to this mode of Being, which itself, however, does not have the mode
of Being of a linguistic phenomenon (whereby in this context "linguistic" means
"of the nature of langue," not "of the nature of langage." The interprtant is, of
course, "linguistic"/langagier in this sense, but it is not an element of langue as
system; this system is in itself mute if it has not been previously interpreted).
Derrida gives the following commentary on this thought.
There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the reprsenter so
that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity
of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a represen-
tamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The represen-
tamen functions only by giving rise to an interprtant that itself be-
comes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified
conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of
the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a struc-
ture of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the
representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely
proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already
a representamen. (GR, 49-50)
Derrida thus interprets the play of each sign on two levels (that of langue and that
of interpretation) as the originary dividedness of every sign from itself (by virtue
of an interpretation that intervenes between itself and its application in a situa-
tion). The convergence with the basic idea of pragmatism, at any rate, consists
in the fact that for both, language (i.e., the system of signs and of expressive con-
ventions) is not a transcendental principle in itself, but becomes such only by
means of a prelanguage-systematic condition of possibility that itself can no
longer be characterized as transcendental (individuality for Deleuze, diffrance
for Derrida, interpretation for Peirce).
Something very similar is the case in Wittgenstein. To understand the meaning
of a word or a chain of words (a proposition) does not mean to know what things
or states of affairs are depicted (or designated) by the words. A significant portion
of linguistic action does not consist in formulating statements about the existing
circumstances of a segment of reality. It could also consist, for example, in "giv-
ing orders and obeying them, forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a
story, play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating
390 D LECTURE 24
from one language into another, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying,
etc."
10
These, in short, are forms of linguistic action in which no substantiating
reference is made to reality. From this Wittgenstein draws the conclusion that,
to the extent that we understand words or expressions that are used in nonsubstan-
tiating "language games," their signification cannot consist in their appropriate-
ness to a (transsemiological) fact, but rather in the manner of their use, insofar
as this use, in its regularity, helps express a collective "form of life." The signi-
fication of a word or an expression is, therefore, the nature of its use in conven-
tionalized, i.e., socially determined contexts of actions. Speech is a manner of
social action, namely, that of communicating; its regularity points to the underly-
ing social praxis. All forms of life are actions that ipso facto are intersubjective
in the sense of being codified. This alone is the ground for their transindividual
comprehensibility. (This, after all, was the problem of epistemological solipsism,
which Wittgenstein sought to escape by reflecting on the essentially intersubjec-
tive character of linguistic signs.)
The germinal thought of so-called speech-act theory is grounded in this con-
sideration. The expression "speech act," although already used by Schleier-
macher in the sense of a linguistic "fact" (see HuK, 89, 77), was coined by John
R. Searle in its specific meaning.
11
Where the main issues are concerned, how-
ever, it goes back to the posthumously published Oxford lectures of the language
philosopher John L. Austin.
12
Austin had asked himself the important question
as to whether previous language philosophy and linguistics had not viewed their
subject, the grammatically well-formed phrase, very one-sidedly and only under
the assumption that a sentence makes a (descriptive) statement, i.e., communi-
cates something that, if it is true, refers to a fact in the world. The obsession with
an Aristotelian model of the logos apophanticds, of the propositional statement,
which was also critically restricted by Heidegger, is still at work here. For Austin
it is clear what the strategic purpose of this obsession was: only propositional
statements can be true or false; therefore they are suited for a language theory
in which the functional logic of the truth value always has control over speech
events. Now there are, according to Austin, aside from the type of the proposi-
tional statement, a large number of nonapophantic forms of expression: one can
carry out actions through speech (therefore the designation "act utterances" or
"speech acts"); indeed, to speak a language means to apply a rule-governed form
of practical behavior. Or, expressed in more accessible terms, to speak means
to carry out acts in accordance with rules. Such an action, for example, would
be the statement, "I promise not to speak too quickly." Here it is not the case that
something is being said about something else; rather, the utterance includes a
practical obligation, i.e., an action, for which I assume the responsibility by utter-
ing the sentence. I can also give orders, insult someone, commit a faux pas, recite
a prayer, be ironic, etc. In all these cases not (only) is something expressed, but
a statement (Searle says: a proposition) is pragmatically interpreted on the basis
LECTURE 24 D 391
of a superposed form of intentionality: a proposition becomes a speech act if one
understands the rule that makes the uttered sentence into the vehicle of a social
and, what is more, of an intentional act, such as is the case, for example, in the
baptismal or consecrational formula of the priest, who not only wants to state
something but also wants to perform an act with this statement. The traditional
model of grammar, therefore, would have to be enriched by all those types of
statements in which presumed propositional statements in fact express intentional
acts. Here "to express" does not necessarily mean "to couch in words," but rather
"to mean," for we almost always mean more than we in reality express. Indeed,
what we mean can never simply be inferred from what we put into language, but
only from the insight into the social rule whose mastery allows communication-
ally competent speakers to form utterances (i.e., situationally interpreted state-
ments) out of statements. One can never determine solely on the basis of its gram-
mar what a statement means, i.e., which form of intentionality it expresses. If,
for example, someone says: "I am counting to three . . .," then I can take this
as a true statement, insofar as he or she really counts to three. However, the
threatening gesture and the enraged voice that accompany this statement (which
as such do not represent linguistic indexes) should have indicated to me that the
speaker wanted to express a serious threat. Austin describes this state of affairs
in the following way: a propositional (and dependent) statement content is inter-
preted in, and as, a speech act (which he also calls performative or illocutionary
act) in such a way that one can tellby virtue of mastering the underlying conven-
tions of behavior-which intention it expresses (in this case, a threat).
I have promised to show you that, and how, Deleuze and Derrida in part sub-
scribe to this theory, and in part alter it. I will make good on this promise in the
next lecture.
Lecture 25
Let's quickly get back to our examination of the point at which the knowledge
interests of a pragmatically oriented language analysis converge with those of ne-
ostructuralist language philosophy.
In his major work, Speech Acts, John R. Searle formulates what he calls the
"principle of expressibility." It states that everything we mean can also be said.
This phrase, however, precisely does not mean that every word employed in a
statement would have to be, or even be able to be, related on a one-to-one basis
to an object (or to a state of affairs, or part of a state of affairs), the recognition
of which allows the addressee to recover the meaning of what was said. On the
contrary, as Wittgenstein had already pointed out,
1
sentences like "Water!"
"Away!" "Ow!" "Help!" "Fine!" and "No!" are neither designations of objects, nor
are they incomplete. In such instances it is rather a matter of linguistic acts, and
complete ones at that, whose meaning I can recapture by supplying them with the
unexpressed conventions for utterances, which however are by no means ineffec-
tive or only elliptically stated. What remains unsaid in a grammatically well-
formed sentence is that which signifies in what (practical) sense the sentence is
to be understood, i.e., which conventionally codified form of intentionality it ex-
presses; whether, for example, it is to be understood as a descriptive statement,
a command, or a request.
Let's keep in mind that Searle holds the view that we frequently mean more
than we in fact say. Here, then, the meaning of what is said would depend on
something that is not said, namely, an interpretation of what was said with a view
to a practical, intersubjectively known aim.
1-JtlL. 1 L K t ITi i_l J V3
Austin more effectively designated this dependence of the "meaning-inten-
tion"
2
of a sentence or a remark on a form of action that interprets it, calling it
the "illocutionary force" of the speech act. The speech act -as the manifestation
of a linguistic praxis has not only a semantic content but also a characteristic
force or power. This already comes to expression in the realm of the presumably
totally value-neutral judgment we make when we characterize arguments as
"strong" or "weak," instead of as "true" or "false." Derrida, in his major confronta-
tion with Searle, makes the following remark in this regard:
In the family of Latin languages, a speech act, whether written or spo-
ken, is only said to be pertinent when it touches: the object to which it
seems to refer, but also why not? someone, its addressee, upon
whom it produces certain effects, let us say of a perlocutionary sort.
(LI, 111)
Derrida characterizes these effects as "valuants" and as manifestations of a lin-
guistically mediated "violence" (LI, Ml). If the common premise of speech-act
theory and neostructuralism is valid, according to which even the constative utter-
ance, i.e., the statement (which has a truth-value function), is dependent on a
practical form of intentionality that interprets it as such a statement; and if, fur-
ther, it is true that this form of intentionality possesses a certain force, then one
can conclude that no conceivable form of language use could in the final analysis
be explained in terms of propositional logic. Or, drawing an even more radical
conclusion: even logic is the manifestation of a force that precedes and institutes
ittotally in keeping with Nietzsche, who identifies the will to power as the prin-
ciple of all expressions of force. We saw that even Foucault, in the last phase of
his thinking, subscribes to this Nietzschean interpretation, according to which
discourses are not simply systems of utterances but rather expressions of power.
The discursive unity that is characteristic of them is not inherent in them but
rather is the force of exclusion inscribed in them, and by virtue of which they rep-
resent precisely this and no other unity. Derrida, too, supported this Nietzschean
interpretation of Austin's theory of speech acts to a certain extent by emphasizing,
"among other topics of interest," especially:
Austin had to free the analysis of the performative from the author-
ity of the value of truth, from the opposition true/false, [". . . two
fetishes which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry with,
viz., 1) the true/false fetish, 2) the value/fact fetish."] at
least in its classical form, occasionally subsituting for it the value
of force, of difference of force (illocutionary or perlocutionary force).
(It is this, in a thought which is nothing less than Nietzschean,
which seems to me to beckon toward Nietzsche; who often
recognized in himself a certain affinity with a vein of English
thought.) (Margins, 322)
394 LECTURE 25
Deleuze's appropriation of speech-act theory is very similar, but takes its orienta-
tion more decisively from Nietzsche's (and Foucault's) theory of power. All infor-
mation (which, as such, seems to be purely constative and to have a truth-value
function) is suspected of being dependent on an execution of power, or of com-
mands that interpret it pragmatically. Thus Searle's "hypothesis that the speech
act is the basic unit of communication" is characteristically transformed into an-
other one (which is gleaned from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals), according
to which "the elementary unity of language the utteranceis the watchword"
(MP, 95).
Rather than common sense, a faculty that centralizes information, an
abominable faculty must be defined that consists in emitting, receiving,
and transmitting watchwords. Speech is not even meant to be believed,
but to obey and make others obey. (MP, 95-96)
Even Spengler and other theoreticians from the sphere of the prefascistic theory
of power are summoned as witnesses to testify for this position (95-96). This
prefascist tradition, whose revitalization we are right now experiencing, is in
need of a more penetrating and critical examination than we can provide at this
point.
I will limit myself to a presentation of the basic idea of Deleuze's variant of
speech-act theory. He reformulates Searle's statementwhich claims that the
propositional content of an utterance can be understood only if I previously under-
stood the intentional meaning of the entire utterance on a metapropositional
level in such a way that it designates all speech as indirect (MP, 97). It is indirect
in the sense that its specific applicational meaning is attributed to it from outside
of its purely grammatical structure. The ultimate applicational meaning, how-
ever, is the "I want," or the "I order you to . . ."
It is in this sense that speech is the transmission of the word functioning
as a watchword, and not the communication of a sign as information.
(97)
Deleuze expressly refers to Austin. Deleuze characterizes the so-called performa-
tives, which Austin formulated in his "famous theses," in the following way:
It has been possible to call acts that are internal to speech these imma-
nent relations of statements with acts implicit or nondiscursive presup-
positions, as opposed to the suppositions, which can always be made
explicit, according to which a statement refers either to other statements
or to an external action (Ducrot). The delimitation of the sphere of the
performative, and of the larger sphere of the illocutory already had
three important consequences: (1) the impossibility of conceiving of
language as a code, since the code is the condition that makes an expla-
nation possible; and the impossibility of conceiving of language as the
LECTURE 25 395
communication of a piece of information; to order, to interrogate, to
promise, to affirm is not to inform someone of a command, a doubt, a
commitment, an assertion, but rather to bring about specific immanent
acts that are necessarily implicit; (2) the impossibility of defining a
semantics, a syntax, or even a phonetics as scientific zones of speech
that are taken to be independent of pragmatics; . . . on the contrary,
pragmatics becomes the presupposition of all other dimensions, and
sneaks in everywhere; (3) the impossibility of maintaining the language-
speech distinction, since speech can no longer be defined simply as in-
dividual and extrinsic use of a prior meaning, or the variable applica-
tion of a preexisting syntax: on the contrary, the meaning and syntax of
language are what cannot be defined independently of the speech acts
that it presupposes. (98)
It seems to me that Austin's basic theses are in fact reiterated in a willful, but es-
sentially correct, manner. And even the step, which neither Austin nor Searle nor
Grice considers and which leads to a general theory of institutions and politics
(understood as the instituted exercise of power), can certainly be taken on the ba-
sis of the premise of speech-act theory. To be sure, this presupposes the view,
or, more correctly, the hypothesis that all "socially relevant" utterances, in the
final analysis, have to be interpreted as commands that are issued by the subject
that represents political power (100). This subject, of course, is not an individual
but rather an institution; it explains the "necessarily social character of utterance"
(101).
The social character of utterance is intrinsically founded only if it can
be shown that the utterance itself refers to collective arrangements.
Thus it is clear that individuation of the statement and subjectification of
the utterance occur only to the extent required and determined by im-
personal collective arrangement. . . .
So long as linguistics does not move beyond constants
phonological, morphological, or syntactic-it refers the statement back
to a signifier and the utterance back to a subject, and thus misses the
point of arrangement, refers circumstances to the outside, closes lan-
guage in on itself, and makes of pragmatics a residue. (101, 104)
Without a doubt-it is almost trivial to note this-institutions operate not as in-
dividuals but rather as collective instruments. Nevertheless, in the end they are
run by individuals and have to do with individuals. It is surprising to see to what
a great extent Deleuze has changed his opinion in the ten years that separate A
Thousand Plateaus from Diffrence et repetition. In the earlier work it was the
operation of differentiation, which could never be sublated (in Hegelian terms)
into a unity, which prevented the "code" from attaining closure. Now language
in its entirety (le langage tout entier, MP, 106) is conceived as an instrument of
power, as a political fact, and that also means: as a code. No doubt, it is conceived
396 L' LECTURE 25
as a code of another order than that of lexics or of syntax: these two domains are
rather put into service by a pragmatics that is interpreted as a politics of language
(La pragmatique est une politique de la langue"; 105); everything in these realms
that lays claim to a certain compulsoriness exhibits a dependence on the dictates
of the pragmatic-political code.
A type of statement can only be evaluated in terms of its pragmatic im-
plications, that is, its relation to the implicit presuppositions, to the im-
manent acts or incorporeal transformations that it expresses, and which
are going to introduce new divisions between bodies. The true intuition
is not the judgment of grammaticality, but the evaluation of the internal
variables of utterance in relation to the set of circumstances. (106)
In other words, the nonclosure of the grammatical code is explained in terms of
its dependence on pragmatics; this, however, can by all means be described as
a supercode, or as a code of a second degree. If the former is "direct discourse,"
then the latter is "indirect discourse": "Indirect discourse is far from presupposing
a direct discourse, for the latter is extracted from the former, to the extent that
the signifying operations and the processes of subjectification are distributed, at-
tributed, or assigned in an arrangement, or that the variables of the arrangement
enter into constant relations, however provisional they may be" (106). It is of little
consequence to conjure up the provisional aspect of such second-degree codes,
and it is of just as little consequence to multiply them (we are familiar with this
from Foucault and Barthes).
It is obvious that a society is traversed by several semiotics and in fact
has mixed orders. . . . A molecular arrangement of utterance . . .
assembles many orders of heterogeneous signs. Glossolalia. Writing is
perhaps the bringing to light of this arrangement of the unconscious, the
selection of the whispering voices, the convocation of the tribes and the
secret idioms, from which I extract something I call Moi. (106, 107)
The multiplication, and even the "heterogenization," of the code merely always
makes the deciphering of each of the schematized forms of intentionality into a
deductively certain and predictable event; in contradistinction to this, the in-
dividual arrangement, which, for example, is shaped by a style (see 123ff.), can
never be derived from a prior code (precisely because it rearranges the elements
of this code or these codes in a new, unforeseen combination). Only if the watch-
word itself is understood as something coded can one believe that individual
speech actions and the "ego" (moi), which functions as their (grammatical) sub-
ject, can be derived from them. But then this pragmatic code ceases to be what
Deleuze takes it to be, namely, an indirect discourse. To the extent that it can de-
termine discourses subordinated to it, it itself is something whose rules can be
brought to light in a series of propositional statements (in a direct discourse). To
LECTURE 25 397
codify the subject means to shackle exactly that agency that alone could ground
change in meaning and the openness of the code. It is clear that a moi, understood
as the result of the system, is not capable of performing this task. Only as the sub-
ject of indirect discourse would it be adequately defined. It might seem as if
Deleuze in fact wants to say exactly this when he writes: "JE is a watchword"
(107). At the same time, however, he calls the cogito or "self-consciousness" the
"incorporeal transformation of a watchword or the result of an indirect discourse"
(107). As the result of a dictate, however, it could no longer be meaning-creative;
rather it would be affected by the inertia of the utterances that can be expressed
in the direct discourse.
Once again we have the opportunity to observe in Deleuze's formulation the
return of what is repressed, something that inevitably gives itself away in the use
of the reflexive pronoun: "Without a doubt, arrangements vary, transform them-
selves" (198; emphasis added). This "itself (se), which is scarcely hidden in this
self-reflective movement, could only be the "itself" of a subject capable of mean-
ing: there is no transsubjective reflectivity. Only a subject that relates itself to it-
self would be capable, in an act of application, of going beyond a grammatically
well-formed phrase and moving in the direction of a form of intentionality that
is implicitly inscribed in it. Without the pragmatic provisions (agencements), lan-
guage, according to Deleuze, would remain a pure virtuality (198). That is cer-
tainly true; but without the intervention of a real individual even this agencement
would itself remain such apure virtuality that would make no sense at all on the
level of concrete language use.
The essentially correct idea that an element of langue (and the grammatical
rule that generates it) does not already imply its application is thus retracted by
the opposite thought, according to which even application has its rules, however
provisional they might be. A rule of a higher order could, in fact, never determine
the sphere of application of the lower one without for its part being in need of
a rule that determines it; and this would lead to an infinite regress. It could be
interrupted only by a kind of decision that has the structure of a semantic-
pragmatic hypothesis, and this means the structure of an interpretation. Interpre-
tations have a relation to provisions and to "semantic-pragmatic codes," but they
cannot be determined on the basis of them. This systematic indeterminacy can be
characterized as their freedom. What is missing in the machine-world of taxo-
nomic pragmatism, as well as in the theoretical universe of A Thousand Plateaus,
is the regard for the moment of freedom without which social complexes of rules
in truth cannot be distinguished from natural determinants and biophysical laws.
The idea of a total determination by means of sociopragmatic contexts, or the idea
of a closed and saturated context in general, remains far behind Lacan's idea that
it is rather the subtraction (and thus the absence of an element in the chain of sig-
nifies) that elevates the remaining elements to the rank of an order in the first
place and permits them to function symbolically (as opposed to a natural order,
398 LI LECTURE 25
whose mode of Being would be the law, and whose mechanism would be func-
tionalistic determinism). Order is symbolic precisely in the sense that it is not
closed, and thus cannot have a determining effect. Nondetermination is only the
negative expression of the positively designable "fact of freedom." It is missing
in any theory that draws inferences from the "meaning-constitutive lack" of the
symbolic order, i.e., in neostructuralist pragmatics.
In my opinion, Jacques Derrida undertook a more noteworthy advance in the
direction of a reception of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism on the basis of neostructural-
ism's premises. What is more, Derrida's endeavor is among the very few under-
takings in which neostructuralism was prepared to test and even risk its position
in a debate with another style of thought (in this case, the Anglo-Saxon style of
thought). It is unfortunate that this debate has remained an exception (if one dis-
regards for the moment Derrida's debate with Gadamer)
3
and must also be consid-
ered a failure. I am thinking of Derrida's confrontation with John R. Searle in
Glyph. There is a prehistory that leads up to this confrontation, and I want to call
it briefly to mind.
In August 1971 Derrida gave a long paper entitled "Signature vnement con-
texte" at the Congrs international des Socits de Philosophie de langue franaise
in Montreal. In the final two sections of this paper he discussed Austin's analysis
of performatives, i.e., the theory of speech acts that Austin called "performa-
tives"(Latin: performare, to carry something out, a linguistic threat, for example,
or a declaration of love, or a promise, etc.). Derrida characterized Austin's analy-
sis as "patient, open, aporetic, in constant transformation, often more fruitful in
the recognition of its impasses than in its positions" {Margins, 322). For the most
part Derrida reflected on possible motives for Austin's banishment of the so-
called infelicities from the corpus of standard or normal performatives. Normal
performatives are those that are carried out according to a convention, i.e., in ac-
cordance with what is usual. Infelicities, on the other hand, unsuccessful perfor-
matives, are those that are ineffective, for example, a threat that could be misun-
derstood as a statement, because its external appearance was that of an affirmative
statement (as in the example cited earlier).
I will limit my discussion first to this aspect. In order to keep the proliferation
of infelicities under control, Austin, according to Derrida, has to work with the
concept of an exhaustively determinable context. This concept, however, presup-
poses that the intentional consciousness of the speaker has to be able completely
to survey the entire speech act in all its contextual ramifications.
This conscious presence of the speakers or receivers who participate in
the effecting of a performative, their conscious and intentional presence
in the totality of the operation, implies teleologically that no remainder
escapes the present totalization. No remainder, whether in the definition
of the requisite conventions, or the internal and linguistic context, or
LECTURE 25 399
the grammatical form or semantic determination of the words used; no
irreducible polysemia, that is no "dissemination" escaping the horizon of
the unity of meaning. (Margins, 322)
Yet there are those awkward "infelicities," and even Austin himself has to con-
cede that principally one cannot exclude the possibility that performatives will
fail. Derrida concludes from this that the meaning-effects of speech can never be
conventionally mastered with absolute certainty, that there is no preestablished
harmony between what Husserl calls the "animating intention" and its "proposi-
tional content," and that every new utterance of a type of speech acta promise,
for example-places in question the norm or convention that has been applicable
up to that point. Therefore Austin's ostracism of figurative, metaphorical, or
fictive speech can only be understood as a theory-strategic move, but it cannot
be substantiated.
Derrida consequently asks himself what a theory of linguistic action would
look like that could account for the infelicity, for misunderstanding, and for
nonunderstanding as principal possibilities of the act of communication with one
another.
Searle replied to this question in 1977 in the first volume of Glyph, proceeding
selectively and limiting his answer to "those [points] that seem to me to [be] the
most important and especially [to] those where I disagree with his conclusions"
(/?, 198). As an analytically trained thinker, he concedes that he does not always
find Derrida's argumentation very clear. Above all, he thinks the picture Derrida
draws of Austin bears no resemblance at all to the original. Now and again he
considers a more favorable reading of Derrida, but he cannot shake the impres-
sion that "Derrida has a distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously
false" (/?, 203). Derrida, for his part, replied to this position in great detail. His
answer is also printed in Glyph in an English translation.
I do not want to waste any time describing all the jokes Derrida plays on
Searle. Some are very funny, others a little dull. At any rate, Searle broke off
the debate, and that is unfortunate. Perhaps Derrida could have prevented this by
selecting speech acts that expressed a more benevolent intent.
Derrida calls the debate "improbable," and this is in fact the case, since, as I
mentioned, there is scarcely any contact at all between the French and Anglo-
Saxon theoreticians of language. But what is just as improbable is the surprising
fact that Derrida takes note of a minimal accord between his position and Searle's.
This minimal accord consists in the view of both philosophers about the nature
of a system of types that establish communication, whereby I am retaining
Searle's notion of a "type" in order to characterize with it a sign or a speech act.
To be understood, as we know, signs or types have to obey a convention that both
speaker and addressee master. Otherwise the meaning or the intention that the one
attributes to his or her utterances would not be received by the other. The latter
400 LI LECTURE 25
has to be capable of recognizing the perceived sounds as signs with a certain signi-
fication or a certain meaning. Searle and Derrida concur that the numerous in-
dividual linguistic "events'
1
(or "tokens") are all reducible to a finite number of
"types" that I can always use in new combinations when I address you, and with
which you are familiar as competent speakers of the language I am using. If you
understand me, then you master the grammar of the language I am speaking; and
if you recognize the speech acts that I carry outfor example, if you recognize
that I am presenting a lecture, that I sometimes make a promise, or that I request
your attention when we come to a difficult matterthen you master the conven-
tions of public presentation, of promise, and of request. All these are linguistic
types.
Perhaps you will say that this is trivial and self-evident. I think so too, but
Searle emphasizes that he does not consider this point to be self-evident and that
he is glad to be at one with Derrida at least in this. As a matter of fact, it is the
only point at which their opinions converge.
To begin with I want to retrace the path that Searle takes by investigating the
conclusions he draws from the aforementioned established principle. First he
gives this principle an entirely different semblance: he says that one can also de-
scribe the conventionality of linguistic acts as their "iterability." Iterability means
repeatability. When a convention has dominion, according to Searle, then it has
the effect that I can repeat the type of linguistic action in question, let's say a given
promise, in an unlimited number of individual cases without its meaning being
changed. In much the same way, adhering to the rules of chess, which always
remain the same, you can make an infinite number of different moves or play an
infinite number of games. For Searle the criterion of sameness plays the major
role here. He says that "any conventional act involves the notion of the repetition
of the same" (/?, 207, emphasis added).
Apparently that is a wholly reasonable and innocent statement. It nevertheless
forms the point of contention in the confrontation with Derrida. How is that possi-
ble? Let me first attempt to uncover some presuppositions that are implied in
Searle's definition. I can find four implications. Searle thinks that the iterability
of conventional signs or types is, first, a basic requirement of successful commu-
nication. That is the minimal consensus with Derrida. Second, he believes that
this iterability by virtue of the "recursivity" of linguistic rules embraces an "in-
finite number of possible communications [and of different contents]" (208).
Third, he is of the opinion that iterability is necessarily the repetition of the same.
For if signification changes in the act of communication, then the rules that pre-
scribe language use also change; and if the rules change, then one cannot fix them
in a closed system of speech acts, which, however, is exactly what Searle is trying
to do. He unambiguously speaks of a "Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts."
4
Already
at this point we note that Searle seeks to expand the traditional model of grammar,
which is interested only in propositional statements, by adding to it all other types
LKCTURK25 G 401
of speech acts; but he by no means intends to undermine the concept of conven-
tionality itself. Promises, to be sure, are not truth functions, but their success fol-
lows a rule that is just as inviolable as that of logic: there is a finite and managea-
ble number of types, of conventions, and of rules that control the contexts. If we
recall what we observed a few lectures ago about the model of the code and of
decodation, then it will not be difficult to recognize in Searle's third implication
the old model of encoding and decoding of types from a code. Formerly they were
statements, now they are performances. Language use in situations of practical
action thus remains basically masterable for anyone to whom one taught the
respective convention by means of education and culture. And since in the case
of linguistic action intentions are encoded and decoded ("What does the other per-
son want to express by what he says? Does he want to threaten me? Or does he
simply want to show me something? Does he want to teach me something? Or
is he only talking to himself as he usually does? In short, what is his purpose,
his intention?"), since, in other words, even intentions are codified, then I, as a
theoretician of speech acts, have to assume that the intention of the speaker does
not change in the act of communication. Therefore, and this is the fourth implica-
tion of Searle's thesis, the category of intention could never turn up as the
troublemaker, as the disruptive element in the system of significations.
With this I have almost betrayed the point of what Derrida calls the metaphysi-
cal implications of speech-act theory. One might think that the signification of the
signs I utter is secured by grammar and by the lexicon, but that the intention with
which I animate them in any given instance (e.g., as threat or promise) is in-
dividually assigned to them and can be acquired neither by mastery of a language
nor by a good education. But this is precisely what for Searle is not the case: the
intention with which a phrase is determined as threat or as promise is just as
universal and just as conventional as the signification of the signs I use. An inten-
tion that is supposed to be understood by others can never be mine alone, accord-
ing to Searle; it has to be capable of being repeated without loss of meaning. All
of this follows strictly from his premise. But there is a problem here. Searle main-
tains that "normally" (i.e., in the "standard case") a speaker or an author means
what he says: "understanding the utterance consists in recognizing the illocution-
ary intentions of the author and these intentions may be more or less perfectly
realized by the words uttered, whether written or spoken" (/?, 202).
Now I ask you: how is it that you know exactly what you mean with an utter-
ance? And above all: how do you know what someone else means with the words
he or she utters? Whoever can say what he or she means can just as well not say
what they mean; logically that is just as feasible. And he or she can "realize" what
he or she means "more or less perfectly" in the words uttered. In this "more or
less perfectly" lies the entire problem of speech-act theory, and probably of ana-
lytical hermeneutics as well. For if meaning and saying can divaricate by even
the slightest bit, then the rigid code model of linguistic action seems to have its
402 G LECTURE 25
faults. That is the point on which Derrida puts his finger, and now I would like
to present his counter to this.
Derrida, like Searle, takes his point of departure from the minimal consensus
about the linguistic system and about the iterability of linguistic types. But he
draws very different conclusions from this than Searle. I will again proceed by
developing these conclusions step by step, and only after having done this will
I try them out in the confrontation with Searle. The matter is a relatively compli-
cated one, and I thus will have to turn to that speech act mentioned earlier and
ask you for your attention.
First of all, Derrida brings the following feature of communication to light:
to be able to function as an intersubjective medium of communication, the code
(or convention, if you will) requires a certain distancing of the speaker from
his/her utterances. Derrida speaks of absence, but if you dislike the term, then
replace it with that of utterance. In German, etwas ussern, "to utter something,"
means to put something outside of oneself, to disconnect something from oneself
as the speaking subject, to distance oneself from what is uttered. But to what ex-
tent do I distance myself from my utterances? Well, I, with my private and singu-
lar intentions, have to withdraw behind what I utter, otherwise my message could
not be understood by others; i.e., otherwise it would go against the demands of
the code. Both demands-that of distancing and that of iterability are conditions
of a structural nature; i.e., one cannot dispose of them by pointing out counterex-
amples in which the speaker is present "at" his/her utterances or in which an utter-
ance by chance occurs only once.
I first want to present the conclusions Derrida draws from the condition of iter-
ability. Every repetition, he says, differentiates and defers. It differentiates be-
cause one can distinguish the first and the second use of a repeated type. And it
defers by distributing the two usages over two different points in time. One cannot
simultaneously say something and repeat something. That, I think, is evident.
Now Derrida asks: who actually proves to me that the signification of a speech
act is the same in the second application as it is in the first? Who actually says
that it has remained the same after passing through the gap of iteration?
You will say that one can tell by the fact that during the conversation no distur-
bance occurs. And then I take this continuity as a sign that reciprocal understand-
ing is taking place. When we speak in such a way, we are assuming that there
can be understanding only where something identical is understood. But Derrida
doubts that such a rigorous attitude is necessary in order to explain linguistic com-
munication.
He first strictly investigates the consequences that follow from his observa-
tions and does not concern himself much about objections of a practical nature.
He thinks that one cannot deny that time elapses between two uses of a linguistic
type, and that this time interval separates the two uses from each other. Separation
LECTURE 25 D 403
is thus an ineluctable feature of repeated use. The other requirement is sameness,
for otherwise the second use would no longer be repetition but rather perhaps the
use of another type. In order to distinguish these contradictory features from
those of permanence a type whose granitic identity could not be eroded by the
flow of the history of language would be permanent-Derrida comes up with a
ticklish formulation. He speaks of the "nonpresent remaining of a differential
mark" (Margins, 318). At this point, those of us who know our Saussure have
to prick up our ears. For what could this nonpresent remaining of a differential
mark be other than that which Saussure designates as aposme in his Notes iteml
The "remaining mark" and/or the aposme designate that minimal remaining of
the sign hull without which continuity of communication and of tradition would
be inconceivable, but by means of which the respective significations are not sim-
ply frozen in their sign hulls like quartz molecules in their crystal lattice at a cer-
tain temperature. One could pointedly say that the repetition of a speech act (like
any other mark) is not the same use a second time (even if perhaps in a different
environment that is of no consequence for a sufficiently abstract theory), but
rather that it is another use of the same remaining mark.
This, then, would be the first conclusion Derrida draws: on the basis of the
structural possibility of repetition, the use of every linguistic type bears an index
of uncontrollable change. And when we communicate with each other, we always
take into account the sliding of meaning underneath the expressions; after all, we
learn something from communication with one another or with a book. Our world
becomes richer, our supply of meaning grows. How would this be possible if we
were those speaking machines the robot theory of analytical philosophy conceives
us to be?
Derrida, however, goes a step further and draws an inference that we might
find a little adventurous, namely, that iterability not only prevents the gapless
prsence--soi of a sign over the course of its multiple applications but that it even
undercuts the possibility of recognizing a sign that was not repeated as identical
with itself (L/, 192-98). How can that be? Because, Derrida replies, semiological
orders can attribute signification to their elements only by unequivocally distin-
guishing each one from all others. The key word here is diffrance, as we see.
Now the only question is how Derrida brings his basic theorem into our context.
This is his argument: whatever can establish its own identity only by taking the
detour over all other identities, can, with a certain justification, be said to be sepa-
rate from itself. Hegel, in his Science of Logic, drew this conclusion, and Derrida
does so by saying that the sign is debarred from the immediate perception of its
identity, for between it and itself stands the set of all other signs upon which its
"value" is dependent. Now some of us will say that that is surreptitious, for after
all the differentiations have been executed, then every sign in a system of course
has one and only one signification, and this signification is identical. But Derrida
has an answer to this as well. He replies that this is very nice, but that the language
404 C LECTURE 25
system on the basis of which we make this statement, first, has to be cut to the
quick by means of a sort of paralyzing incision before we can accomplish this final
differentiation in it. In fact, however, language is constantly altered by speech;
while speaking we always differentiate the significations of expressions anew;
everything is in constant flux, and the identity of a signification is something
purely hypothetical. "Meanings are changed for everyone" Sartre says, "by each
speaker and each day; the meanings of the very words in my mouth are changed
by others."
5
So much for the moment with regard to Derrida's conclusions from the struc-
tural feature of iterability. Closely related to this is what he takes to be the second
objection to the notion of conventionality: the always possible absence of in-
dividual and pertinent (aktuelien) intention of the mark (LI, 194-95). Derrida
does not mean, as Searle insinuates, that intention therefore does not play a role
in the execution of a linguistic act. He merely means that my or your current in-
tention, which is completely determined by the discursive situation, temporarily
sets (i.e., "fills out") the meaning of the utterance in question. Individual intention
never permeates the sign in such a way that it would fuse with it into the unity
of an unalterable type. After all, we agreed, as did Derrida and Searle as well,
that linguistic signs are only generally understood because their signification is
not applicable only for me here and now and in these circumstances. While
speaking I distance myself from my individuality. This is the only way in which
the totality of signs can even be founded as a sign system, i.e., as a transindividual
convention, in the first place. This, to be sure, leads to the conclusion that the
pertinent (aktuelien) "animation" of the signs by an individual intention is not a
fact that could be derived from the concept of convention. The system of linguis-
tic types also has to elevate the forms of intentionality to the rank of types, and
precisely by doing this it strictly disregards the singular animations of the types
at different times and in different contexts. However, it is exactly these individual
intentions, which elude the concept of the code, that undermine the granitic dura-
bility of the code by "iterating" and differentiating the linguistic types, i.e., by
displacing them in a systematically uncontrollable way. "Once again, iterability
makes possible idealization and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is in-
dependent of the multiplicity of factual events-while at the same time limiting
the idealization it makes possible: broaching and breaching it all at once" (LI,
200). Derrida seeks to take this into account when he holds up to Austin and
Searle, who work with the concept of a "complete context," that the intention of
a speech act is never entirely present to itself, that it in part eludes itself. This
loss of fullness, which befalls intention by means of the uncontrollable activity
of the formation and displacement of differences, is both the condition of codifica-
tion, and the condition for the ability of signs to break with their codification and
open up to human language the infinite field of history. Language theory can only
step into this field at that moment when it cuts through the shackle of the code
LECTURE 25 G 405
and provides the concept of iterability of types with the index of their possible
changes in meaning.
And this is precisely what Searle does not do. For him it is clear "that any con-
ventional [or, as Derrida calls it, 'coded') act involves the notion of the repetition
of the same" {R, 207; emphasis added). The strategic necessity of this assumption
is immediately evident. Searle tells us that he understands his theory of speech
acts as the linguistic analogue to the idealizing method of most natural sciences
{Speech Acts, pp. 57-61). In order to attain his goal, he has to assume that inten-
tions are, so to speak, nailed to their expressions and that the imprecision of the
available concepts is reducible: one can "idealize" them and free them from
"chance" and "impurity." In this way unproblematic and "ideal speech situations"
or "pragmatic universals" are generated, under whose protective dominion it is
possible to seriously communicate. Well, that is an analytical conclusion drawn
on the basis of the methodological premises, but it is by no means a conclusion
based on the nature of spoken language. Serious (i.e., "nonfigu rati ve" and nonfic-
tive) speech is accordingly a theoretical construct. Speech-act theory abstracts
from the experiential reality of everyday communication until it comes to the
point at which it has grouped a finite number of entities and laws that free it from
having to give any further consideration to concrete deviations from actual lan-
guage use, i.e., from considering any irregularity whatsoever. In order to under-
stand a speech act, Searle claims that "it is necessary to know that anyone who
said it and meant it would be performing that speech act determined by the rules
of the languages that give the sentence its meaning in the first place" (/?, 202).
In other words, idealization methodologically excludes the "parasitic" use the
transforming repetition of the type and operates with a rigid model of conven-
tion that assigns one and only one totally determined applicational meaning to ev-
ery expressive material according to the performative rules that are to be applied
in any given instance. This model can function only if the invariability of the
signs, i.e., of the codified entities of meaning-expression, remains unshaken, if
intention "fills out" expression without any remainder. Since Searle thinks that
this is the case and that the model of convention is thus sufficient to explain the
effects of "normal" communication, one has to presume that he considers abnor-
mal any use of language that alters meaning; yet without it phenomena such as
the evolution of language and progress in knowledge are impossible.
His reaction to unsuccessful speech acts, therefore, is simply to explain them
as violations of the norm and thus, complementarily, to explain them on the basis
of the explicit rule. What the infelicity cannot achieve is achieved by the theory
of infelicity. It heals the malady by deriving it ex negativo from the norm. In anal-
ogy to the strategy of the rule of three, it supplements to the rule whatever
regularity everyday reality lacks: misunderstanding and the "incomplete speech
act" are only the shadows thrown by the battlements of the complete act and of
406 LECTURE 25
total understanding onto the incomplete framing of its structural foundation. This
tendency reaches its zenith in H. P. Grice's "Logic and Conversation."
6
When Derrida disputes that one can ever strictly determine the line that runs
between the figurative and the nonfigurative use of language, or, for that matter,
as Searle demands, that one can establish a logical relation of dependence be-
tween the two, he attacks the fetishism of rule formation and law formation in
the human sciences in general. Of course, there is nothing to object to in inves-
tigating traditional contexts, societal orders, forms of discourse, speech patterns,
or even literary texts with an eye for the structures that make the set of "events"
recognizable as cases of universal regularities. The orders mentioned earlier have
in common that individuals can acquire a certain competence in regard to them.
The concept of competency, which-following Chomsky-was at times sub-
stituted for Saussure's langue, Hjelmslev's schematism, or Humboldt's system,
designates, much like they do, a capability, a potential, an only virtual being, a
m on in Plato's sense. Yet a merely virtual possibility could never appear as the
antecedent in a real causal chain. Competency could have results only under the
condition that a self-conscious being, capable of taking action, would realize one
or the other possibility. To realize a systematically presented possibility does not
mean (as Saussure emphasizes) to be subject to the compulsion of adherence. For
such an instance idealist philosophy made the distinction between "necessitation"
and "motivation": the former designates causal processes set in motion by a real
cause; the latter designates those causal processes set in motion by an ideal cause
(a ground). An effect is necessitated when, on the basis of certain presuppositions
and constellations, it could not possibly not occur. An effect is motivated, on the
other hand, when, although not coming about without presuppositions, it allows
its presuppositions to become effective causes only under the condition that it
previously interpreted them as such. Now the sort of adherence to a rule that we
encounter in the performance of a speech act can proceed only according to the
second scheme, for pragmatic universals and the concept of language as system
designate pure potentialities that still have to be individualized in order to exist
really. But who is supposed to accomplish this individualization? Language it-
self? There are certain tendencies in analytical philosophy that are inclined to con-
ceive the matter in exactly this way. According to this, language not only would
be the master of its own application, but it would propagate totally "on its own,"
i.e., without the intervention of subjects that are capable of action and that have
mastery of meaning. "The rule," according to Wittgenstein, whom I would like
to cite here as the representative of numerous Anglo-Saxon philosophies, "once
stamped with a particular meaning, traces the lines along which it is to be fol-
lowed through the whole of space."
7
One can easily understand the motive for
this autonomization of language if one recognizes that any other view would be
incompatible with the predilection of this theory for the scientific: only when lan-
guage controls its own statements is it guaranteed that the linguistic event will not
LECTURE 25 407
challenge the type according to which it is formed. One has to make certain that
this does not happen; otherwise the measure of concrete effects of meaning would
elude convention, and the anarchy of meaning, as Derrida conceives it, could no
longer be contained.
Indeed, with this the weakest link in speech-act theory's chain of argumenta-
tion is put under stress. Nobody not even Searle himselfcan overlook that
idioms such as the "power of convention" have no place in the realm of serious
speech. They borrow from the rhetoric of metonymy by interpreting human deeds
as objective forces.
To be sure, there is method in this rhetoric. It bestows upon the pragmatic sys-
tem what it previously had to take away from meaning-producing individuality:
namely, the capacity for reflectivity, for spontaneity, and for continuity. From
now on all these capacities are attributed to the language process itself. Yet it is
precisely by means of this displacement that this theory confirms against its own
will, of course that it cannot get along without the power of subjectivity, indeed,
that it constantly lays claim to it. The same problem that we already ascertained
in the case of Deleuze's pragmatism returns: the concept of a "language that
speaks itself subjectifies language; in this assertion language itself is the gram-
matical and the personal subject of action. Now according to the classical view,
subjectivity is in fact an anarchical capacity: it does what it wants to do. That is
why one first has to shackle it by means of conventions; only then does it serve
theory like a horse in its bridle.
I am insisting so vigorously on this distortion of subjectivity because it seems
to me that it has to do with Derrida's and Searle's minimal consensus about the
nature of sign systems. Both, for different reasons, refrain from laying claim to
the agency of a subjectivity or individuality that attributes and changes meaning.
This seems to me to be connected with the fact that for both, the problem of an
application of linguistic types does not arise.
In closing this lecture, I would like only to give a prospectus of what is yet
to come. Both Derrida and Searle place themselves in the tradition of American
pragmatism, above all in that of Charles S. Peirce. I do not want to bring a new
name and a new branch of theory into the debate, and thus I will only explain what
pragmatism has to do with this. It is the doctrine according to which human beings
arrive at knowledge only through actions and practical experience; for example,
we arrive at the thesis of the existence of an independent external world through
the experience of the unyieldingness of objects. In terms of semiotics this means
that human beings arrive at the significations of the signs that they use by always
specifically (i.e., never once and for all) interpreting them in the given situation.
The meaning of a sentence is its use in any given situation. And this also accounts
for the evolution of language, for I do not have to use the expression in different
situations in exactly the same way.
I have presented this in extremely simplified fashion. But it already becomes
408 U LECTURE 25
clear why I think that Searle, whose speech-act theory itself actualizes certain in-
sights of pragmatism, falls short of Peirce by establishing firm rules for the situa-
tions in which signs can be applied, rules that are precisely intended to make these
linguistic actions timeless and independent of specific situations. In Derrida's case
it is quite different, as we have seen. He takes for granted that the effects of mean-
ing of living language use cannot be derived from contextual rules like an infer-
ence can be derived from a premise. Nevertheless, he does not want to subscribe
to the assertion that it is individuals, who are firmly rooted in history and who
relate freely (which does not mean with complete cognizance) to their situations,
who are responsible for application and the evolution of language. Must we then
assume that the marques iterate and alter themselves completely on their own?
It looks this way. Derrida, of course, has one argument against the recourse
to the speaking individual subject. He maintains, in a manner similar to that of
Wittgenstein or Searle himself, that subjectivity either has a signification or it
does not. If it has one, it is an effect of language; if it does not have one, how
is one supposed to be able to speak of subjectivity?
If we reflect further on this point we either get to the heart of the problem, or
we get into an awful predicament. For the moment I can only hint at what I im-
agine the solution to be. In my opinion, it does not follow from the statement that
without differance there would be no significations, and also no change of signi-
fications, that significations are generated only by means o/linguistic differential-
l y. Linguistic differentially the linguistic code, convention forms the condi-
tion without which there could be neither speaking nor understanding. But the
agency that sees to it that meaning can in each instance be produced and under-
stood is subjectivity as individuality. I can only vaguely sketch how this can be
conceived in semiotic terms. In every sign that is communicated between
speakers there is a universal and an individual element. Without the universal ele-
ment, there would be no understanding; without the individual element, there
would be understanding only of what is universal and rule-governed. Yet it is a
fact that can be repressed, but hardly denied, that universals and rules are
challenged over the course of the history of speech; they are distorted, separated
from themselves, and thus changed. How might this be possible if the sign were
only the instrument that executes the prescriptions of the universal code? How
might this be possible if it were not at the same time something other, namely,
the individual manner in which this code is applied in each instance in a speech
act? Now we can see how Searle's aporia can be dissolved. When he writes that
every speaker really says what he or she means at least "more or less
perfectly" only when he or she is serious and is not talking nonsense, i.e., really
says what he/she means, then he is confronted with the problem of having to ex-
plain any failures in communication in terms of infractions of the rules. If one
no longer considers these infractions to be infractions, but rather takes them as
what they are: the effective contribution of individual creations of meaning ("in-
LECTURE 25 U 409
dividual additives," as Boeckh says), then one can easily comprehend why al-
ready Schleiermacher and Humboldt insisted that one never understands what
someone else says; that one is always only understood, and always understands,
only "more or less perfectly." In each act of communication signs are exchanged.
What is identical about them is only their character as marks, as aposmes. Signi-
fication, however, has a certain leeway with regard to how it is disposed; it is al-
ways inscribed anew to be sure, within reasonable limits by individuals into
the "mark" and has, as Humboldt says, "no permanent place even in writing."
8
With this we are returned to where we began: to the problem of interpretation
and the undecidability of the meaning of a text.
Lecture 26
Philosophical theories tend generally to be less fruitful in those instances where
they exhaust themselves in the internal workings of their own execution (and in
the formation of a school), than in those cases where they enter into competition
with other theories and schools, particularly those that evolve out of different
points of departure. Only when they bring the voice of an Other into contact with
their own can theories avoid the narcissism of what Husserl, in his Logical Inves-
tigations, called "the solitary mental life" of an internal self-conversation, and on
which Derrida remarked
that there is no indication in this inner life because there is no commu-
nication; that there is no communication because there is no alter ego.
And when the second person does emerge in inner language, it is a
fiction; and, after all, fiction is only fiction. "You have gone wrong,
you can't go on like that"this is only a false communication, a feigned
communication. (SP, 70)
Feuerbach had reproached Hegel's philosophy of reflection with precisely this:
under the pretext of meeting with the Other in its Otherness, it actually only held
a speculative monologue with the Other-of-itself\ Hegel's reflection "dissimi-
iates": "It only pretends, but does not mean it seriously; it plays."
1
In this sense we will welcome Derrida's debate with Searle as one of the few
fruitful moments in which something like genuine communication took place be-
tween Anglo-American pragmatism and neostructuralist language philosophy.
To be sure, that does not mean that Derrida generally formulated his critique of
410
L f c Cl UKf c Zt> LJ 411
the code model of understanding and his critique of the conventionalism of lan-
guage theory by means of arguments that in themselves were new to his work.
On the contrary, it can be shown that the main points of his critique had already
been set down in his early examination of the concept of the sign in Husserfs Log-
ical Investigations, I would like to support this assertion by means of a short and
selective reading of Speech and Phenomena, without, however, getting caught
up in the internal arguments of his confrontation with Husserl.
There are primarily two complexes of problems that connect Limited Inc with
the thematics of Speech and Phenomena. First of all, it is a question of surveying
the field on which the problem of iterability converges with the problem of scien-
tific idealization; and second, it is a question of what results the conclusion, which
asserts that the "effects of meaning" cannot be systematically controlled, has for
a semantics or pragmatics that wants to hold on to the concept of a subject.
Let's begin by disentangling the strands of the first complex of problems. In
Speech and Phenomena it appears in the following context, which is different
from that of Limited Inc: how can the universality of meaning be guaranteed (in
Husserl's phenomenology, but for the most part we will disregard this link to Hus-
serl) if meaning is simultaneously a character of "expressions" that for their part
are subject to a material basis for expression (Husserl speaks of the "indicative"
character)? One cannot totally disregard the materiality of the "indicative carrier
of expression," for without it no exchange of information could be organized
among real existing subjects in space and time. On the other hand and mean-
while we know this problematics rather well the sign carrier, in its materiality,
cannot on its own guarantee the identity of the meaning it transports; in fact, it
is actualized differently from one articulation to another. If universality is, on the
one hand, dependent on communication (SP, 37f.), and yet threatened, on the
other hand, by the nonidentity in the act of repetition of the expressions, then
nothing remains for a theory that strives for objectivity and masterability of mean-
ing other than rigorous abstraction from the reality of the indication (27ff.). The
indication has to be "reduced," in Husserl's terminology, to its pure essential sub-
sistence (Wesens-Bestand), to that which presents itself to the "solitary mental
life" in "authentic intuition" or "living self-presence" as its meaning. I say "as its
meaning" because meaning is precisely that which remains when I abstract both
from the reality of the empirical subject, which accomplishes the intuition, as well
as from the reality of the possible objects to which this subject might relate.
Meaning is something unreal, something purely ideal; and if it is attached to "ex-
pression," then one has to understand what "expression" means in this context and
to what extent the "phenomenological reduction" embraces it. Saussure's signi-
fiant is always already disclosed in the light of the meaning (signifi) that is as-
signed to it; thus it itself is nothing that is actually real. Rather it is an "acoustic"
or a "graphic image" (image acoustique/graphique) as opposed to the aposme,
the material hull of the word. In much the same manner, what Husserl calls
412 n LECTURE 26
"expression" as opposed to "indication" is not a worldly being, but something
internal and mental: an ideality (Husserl distinguished between the "empirical
body" [Krper], which is always sensual, and the "flesh" [Leib], which is always
spiritual).
The ideal form of a written signifier, for example, is not in the world,
and the distinction between the grapheme and the empirical body of the
corresponding graphic sign separates an inside from an outside,
phenomenological consciousness from the world. (SP, 76)
We can understand in this way why disregarding the existence of the world is not
a loss but rather a gain for phenomenology: only the unreality, the worldlessness
of meaning could guarantee that ideality in whose sphere every repetition of an
expression reproduces with certainty the same meaning. Universality and objec-
tivity: These are idealities themselves. We call universally valid a state of affairs
that maintains itself without a change in meaning in infinitely many occurrences
(which may well be very different from each other). The same is true for objec-
tivity: what is objective is not the existence of this unrepeatable and fleeting ap-
pearance in the midst of the world, but rather what is regular in it and can be
preserved in universally valid statements. In a radical turn of the natural attitude
toward the world, the true Being of things (Plato's ntos on) is therewith revealed
as that which is gained by passing through the abstraction from their worldly Be-
ing. Formulated paradoxically, the ideality of pure essential intuition but also
of that which is fixed in scientific laws is "more being" (seiender) than the Being
of the real world. Husserl accused classical metaphysics of "blindness" for not
(always) having understood this.
. . . always a blindness to the authentic mode of ideality, to that which
is, to what may be indefinitely repeated in the identity of its presence,
because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not real or is irreal
not in the sense of being a fiction, but in another sense which may have
several names, whose possibility will permit us to speak of nonreality
and essential necessity, the noema, the intelligible object, and in general
the nonworldly. This nonworldliness is not another worldliness, this
ideality is not an existent that has fallen from the sky; its origin will al-
ways be the possible repetition of a productive act. In order that the
possibility of this repetition may be open, ideally to infinity, one ideal
form must assure this unity of the indefinite and the ideal: this is the
present, or rather the presence of the living present. The ultimate form
of ideality, the ideality of ideality, that in which in the last instance one
may anticipate or recall all repetition, is the living present, the self-
presence of transcendental life. (6)
But, as noted earlier, we want to disregard for our part Husserl's phenomenology,
as far as possible, in order to concentrate on the parallel with Searle's assertion
LECTURE 26 G 413
that speech-act theory is supposed to secure, by means of the recourse to the type-
token distinction, that "every repetition (of a conventionalized intention, of a form
of intentionality) is the repetition of the same." This sameness (as in Husserl) is
reached by absolute abstraction from the singular utterance-events (tokens), and
by means of their reduction to the type they have in common, i.e., by means of
a gesture of radical idealization. The following applies just as well for speech act
theory as it does for phenomenology.
This ideality is the very form in which the presence of an object in
general may be indefinitely repeated as the same. . . . Ideality is the
preservation of mastery of presence in repetition. (10)
Husserl, of course, tries to found the criterion for the identifiability of repeated
expressions in the identity and self-sameness of a transcendental ego-pole (in this
he is in accord with the most profound impulse of Kant's critique of knowledge),
whereas Searle is satisfied with guaranteeing the return of the same on the basis
of conventionality. Derrida nevertheless has reason for insinuating that both of
them use, whether directly or indirectly, metaphysical forms of thought (if
"metaphysics" means to interpret "Being" as living self-presence and as ideal un-
alterability of essence). Both philosophers hope to be able to isolate and identify
meaning as the invariable form of expressions or manners of utterance. (The tac-
tic directly opposed to this would consist in making meaning dependent on the
play of a never uniform repetition of "indications," "word-bodies," "aposemes.")
Both Husserl and Searle further agree insofar as they mistrust the fact of com-
munication. This assertion may sound unjust, at least where Searle is concerned,
since communication is a focal point of his language theory. Nonetheless, what
Husserl calls the solitary life of the spirit that only speaks with itself essentially
overlaps with communication, as Searle describes it, in that in both cases it has
been decided beforehand what the meaning of the communication is: in phenome-
nology by the view that the indicative nature of the word-signs their spatiotem-
poral concretion as well as the individual-empirical endowment of meaning
remains inessential and external to the significance of what is communicated; in
speech-act theory by the precaution that sees to it that every possible sharing of
information is accomplished only by employing forms of intentionality whose
meaning was known beforehand and which only has to be deciphered by the ad-
dressee of the message (i.e., reduced to the intelligible content of meaning,
retransformed into idealities). The only new thing in a dialogue, according to this,
would be the informational content of a statement; the laws, according to which
meaning and expression are conjoined, follow an input-output model, which
Searle very openly introduces as such in the third chapter of Speech Acts.
"Meaningful speech" is just as strictly determined by conventional frame "condi-
tions" as it is by "appropriate understanding" (see Speech Acts, pp. 57-61). In
other words, this theory does not tolerate any protestation on the part of con-
414 D LECTURE 26
cretely accomplished communication that not only exchanges information but can
also reciprocally put into question the standpoints and worldviews of speakers,
and thus challenge the rules, the "conventions," of "meaningful speech" as such.
To concede this power to communication, however, would mean to limit the im-
portance of idealization, i.e., to strip away the "scientific" aspect of the theory
of speech acts.
Husserl, for his part, got caught up in an analogous aporia when he had to in-
troduce the existence of the other ego (in his Cartesian Meditations). The Other
aside from me for example, my interlocutorhas another self-presence that
principally eludes my own; but if the certitude I infallibly have of the meaning
of what was said consists in the fact that I can make it present to myself in intui-
tion, without having to make use of another word-body, then the "significative
intention" the Other carries out is principally not present to me. What is given
to me are merely the "indications" the Other transmits to me (SP, 37-38).
When I listen to another, his lived experience is not present to me "in
person," in the original. . . . I may have a primordial intuition, that
is, an immediate perception of what is exposed of the other in the
world: the visibility of his body, his gestures, what may be understood
of the sounds he utters. But the subjective side of his experience, his
consciousness, in particular the acts by which he gives sense to his
signs, are not immediately and primordially present to me as they are
for him and mine are for me. Here there is an irreducible and definitive
limit. The lived experience of another is made known to me only inso-
far as it is mediately indicated by signs involving a physical side.
(38-39)
There is thus a fundamental and irreducible alienness in understanding what the
Other has said to me, something that I can never transpose into my "living self-
present": what the Other wants to tell me I can find out only by conjecture and
divination; its meaning is never "given" to me "apodictically." To be sure, I can
have memorized all the maxims of discourse established by Grice, and all the
rules of speech acts set down by Searle, but in the given instance I still do not
know whether the Other also accepts them to the same extent as I, and whether
he or she relates them to the same meaning as I. If meaning, however, is indeed
as Searle wants to have it something transindividual (to attain this, theory ideal-
izes it), then it follows that I alone cannot make a decision about it: meaning is
essentially the meaning of the Other; the Other meaning, or the meaning the Other
produces with the signs I uttered, and it is precisely this meaning that escapes my
authentic essential "intuition." From this it follows that I also do not "authenti-
cally" know my own meaning. And it follows, moreover, that the assumption that
the prelinguistic (ideal) unity of meaning guarantees the sameness of the repeated
sign proves to be badly founded. For meaning cannot be idealized; it essentially
LECTURE 26 415
is in need of support from the "indication," the aposme, the word-body, the real
externalization (Verusserung) of the signs (whose necessity Derrida symbolizes
by the metaphor of writing; 75ff.)
But from all this it by no means follows that there is no ideality of meaning
at all. For Derrida it is rather a question of drawing entirely different conclusions
from the ideality of meaning than those he calls metaphysical. Already in our
previous lecture we saw that he agrees with Searle that all speaking presupposes
the structure of iterability. To repeat something undoubtedly means: to be able
to represence it. The possibility of producing a sign or an utterance repeatedly
as this unity idealizes it, i.e., bestows upon it the unity of its signifying.
2
How-
ever, Derrida adds, it is not the unity of meaning that makes represencing possi-
ble, but, inversely, the unity of meaningits ideality is grounded in the struc-
ture of represenceability: "The presence-of-the-present is derived from repetition
and not the reverse. While this is against Husserl's express intention, it does take
into account what is implied by his description of the movement of temporaliza-
tion and of the relation with the other, as will perhaps become clear later on" (52).
We have already discussed Husserl's theory of time and Derrida's inferences
from it within the context of our question about the neostructuralist theory of the
subject; I would like to put them aside at this point for reasons of economy. Their
function within the current context is immediately evident: if the transcendental
ego is the last refuge of evidence, of self-presence, and of the living intuition of
meaning, then the unity of meaning has to suffer damage as soon as the unity of
this ego is put into question. And this is precisely what happens as soon as one
brings into play the internal temporality of subjectivity that ruptures the self-
presence of the ego and depresences it from the ground up. This depresencing,
we must however note, does not simply end the unity of meaning (as it does that
of the ego): it only challenges it and transforms its status of Being from that of
an apodictic certitude to that of a motivated hypothesis. Both the unity of the self
and that of meaning now only exist hypothetically; it does not master, as "princi-
ple of principles," the flow of time, or, on the linguistic level, the succession of
signs rather it is constituted by the flow of time, or by the structure of repetition.
But this ideality, which is but another name for the permanence of the
same and the possibility of its repetition, does not exist in the world,
and it does not come from another world; it depends entirely on the
possibility of acts of repetition. It is constituted by this possibility. Its
"being" is proportionate to the power of repetition; absolute ideality is
the correlate of a possibility of indefinite repetition. (52)
The consequence of this inversion of the relationship between the structure of
repetition and the ideality of meaning is, as we see, that the unity of objectivity
becomes a hypothesis: a regulative or, as Husserl prefers to say, an "idea in the
Kantian sense." The possibility that this idea could ever be intuitively realized in
416 LI LECTURE 26
my living self-present is excluded by the infinity (i.e., incalculably) of repeti-
tion, which is not a priori limited by any principle and which therefore has to be
the repetition of something always Other (this follows from the fact that it does
not reproduce and represence the sameness of meaning and that it presupposes
the loss of "primordial presence" in its Being even if one conceives what it ac-
complishes as represencing). Derrida demonstrates very nicely what tensions de-
velop between Husserfs reductionism and the insights of his "phenomenology of
internal time-consciousness" (SP, 61fi\). We are already familiar with the deci-
sive conclusion that Derrida draws: he maintains that presence is no authority to
which one can appeal in order to sublate the dividing power of temporality; it is
rather one dimension of time among others that is interwoven in the play of tem-
porization that extends from the past into the future. Whoever says "present" also
implies "temporal." And whoever says "temporal" implies "nonidentical": "does
not everything that is announced already in this reduction to 'solitary mental life'
(the transcendental reduction in all its stages, and notably the reduction to the mo-
nadic sphere of 'owrmcss' Eigenheit etc.) appear to be stricken in its very pos-
sibility by what we are calling time?" (68). This applies for the time dimension
of the present in particulary drastic fashion: in the strict sense, it does not have
a proper Being. What we call present is rather the differential between the past
and the future. Since-as Schelling and subsequently Sartre have shown
3
- the
meaning of "Being" is the having-been, and the meaning of "non-Being" is the not-
yet or the becoming-Being, one can also characterize this relationship in the fol-
lowing way: the present is the incision, which itself is not being (nicht selbst
seiende), through which Being (the past) mediates its anticipation of non-Being
(the future) in order to determine itself from the perspective of this not-yet, i.e.,
to let its meaning be indicated. The old doctrine that states that all determination
is grounded in negation thus discloses its temporal meaning. The statement
"What-is-not determines what-is" (BN, 87) can be rewritten as the claim that the
past lets its meaning (its determination) be indicated by the future in the manner
of a projection (a hypothetical judgment, an interpretation, etc.). The present no
longer plays a role in this formulation: it is reduced to a significant gap between
two aggregates of Being, to a "merely relative point of indifference," as Schelling
expresses it (SW, 1/6, 276). "Because for the soul it never is" it reveals itself to
be the realization of that hinge (brisure) between Being and Being possible, as
the turning point or "crossover" point between "Being and becoming" (SW, 1/6,
229; 1/7, 239). Derrida, by the way, liked to illustrate his idea of diffrance with
the metaphor obrisure, defined as "crack" and "joint, created by a hinge, in the
work of a locksmith" (see Diss, 302-3; GR, 65ff.). We can draw the following
conclusion from this: if the present, looked at carefully, resembles the differen-
tiating brisure, then it is the exact opposite of that "living self-present" of which
Husserl thinks, and in whose name he hopes to neutralize the depresencing effects
of the internal flow of time. It is rather the present itselfas time dimension
LECTURE 26 D 417
whose effect prevents the experiences of consciousness from attaining their real
identification. Every time phase contains retentional and protentional retrospec-
tions and anticipations in itself {i.e., it exists ekstatically, decentrally, and non-
presently); in the same way, every repetition of a sign also is a re-production of
a meaning that was already expressed in anticipation of that meaning that is to
be acquired only in the future (reacquired, and reacquired differently). This
meaning is thus Jepresenced and ^actualized in its structure itself.
How can it be explained that the possibility of reflection and re-
presentation belongs by essence to every experience, without this
nonself-identity of the presence called primordial? How could it be ex-
plained that this possibility belongs, like a pure and ideal freedom, to
the essence of consciousness? . . . In all these directions, the presence
of the present is thought of as arising from the bending-back of a re-
turn, from the movement of repetition, and not the reverse. (SP, 67-68)
Now we at least have the hint of an answer to our first question about the con-
nection of scientific idealization to the problem of iteration. Whereas Husserl be-
lieves that he is able to guarantee that the repetition of signs is the repetition of
the same (signs) only through recourse to the "principle of principles," the "living
self-present" experienced in the absolute ego, Derrida demonstrates that the pos-
sibility for scientific idealization, inversely, is grounded in the possibility of itera-
tion of signs. Yet iteration by no means works in the service of an identity of
consciousness, but rather excludes it: since Husserl also does not escape this con-
sequence, the "principle of principles" becomes an "idea in the Kantian sense" for
him (SP, 9, 100).
The second question we want to pose during the present lecture is closely
linked to the first one. Let me repeat it once more in different words: what follows
from the decentering of the "principle of principles"from the depowermcnt of
the idea of an authentic self-presentfor a hermeneutics that wants to hold on to
the concept of a meaning-conferring subject?
Let's once again take that minimal accord, which connects Derrida's philoso-
phy of language with both Searle's and Husserfs, as a point of departure. This
point of consensus is that the iterability, and thus the idealizability of its elements,
is a necessary prerequisite for every symbolic order. The two parties only dis-
agree about the consequences of this. For phenomenology, as well as for analyti-
cal philosophy, the repeatability and idealizability of types are the recursive con-
dition for the identity of significations; for Derrida, the chain of repetitions,
which has become infinite, is deprived of a criterion for identity, and the identi-
fication of signification is transformed into a hypothetical judgment about whose
truth one cannot finally "decide" (for reasons of principle, not for reasons of
methodological insufficiency). Interpretation becomes infinite.
But for Derrida this infinitude of interpretation is nothing that could be
418 n LECTURE 26
explained hermeneutically by means of the intervention of a meaning-inter-
preting and meaning-projecting individual. On the contrary, he is at one with
Searle and Husserl in his rejection of a hermeneutics of individuality.
Even this consensus can be made comprehensible (for it is far from being de-
pendent on the question of whether significations are "objectively" determinable).
If iterability of signs or utterances is a structural possibility of all rule-governed
speech and obeys the logic of a recursive model in which an arbitrary number
of "tokens" does not threaten the ideality of their "type," then one necessarily has
to disregard the individuality of the speaker's consciousness. Only under the con-
dition of their relative independence on the individual, actual, and historically
singular meaning-intentions of the speakers can the "tokens" that express them be-
come iterable elements of a transindividual convention i.e., "types." The in-
dividual retreats to make room for the universality of the system.
This reduction of individuality is a necessary condition of every scientific
idealization. Frege distinguished "ideas" (Vorstellungen) from "thoughts"
(Gedanken) in this sense; ideas need an owner, "no two men have the same
"idea";
4
in contrast to this, a thought expresses what is the case, at least if this
thought is true. What is true, however, is principally what not only is valid for
a subject but valid for all subjects (according to Frege, a thought-if it is t rue-i s
"timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. It needs
no owner").
5
Thus here also truth, in the sense of transindividual validity, is tied
up with the disenabling of the first-person singular pronoun, to the extent that this
pronoun designates a singular person: "No reason remains for granting an excep-
tional position to that object which I call T."
6
Husserl picked up this theme from Frege in his own Logical Investigations.
There he distinguishes "between essentially subjective and occasional expres-
sions, on the one hand, and objective expressions, on the other."
7
The first cor-
respond to Frege's ideas, the latter to his thoughts. Thus Husserl can argue:
Every expression, in fact, that includes a personal pronoun lacks an ob-
jective sense. The word T names a different person from case to case,
and does so by way of an ever altering meaning. . . . If we read the
word without knowing who wrote it, it is perhaps not meaningless, but
is at least estranged from its normal sense.
8
Derrida cites this remark, as well as the one that asserts that the index word "I"
cannot be immediately significant, but can only have "an indicative function" that
cries "as it were, to the hearer Tour vis--vis intends himself."
9
It is "the univer-
sal semantic function of the word T to designate whoever is speaking, but the no-
tion through which we express this function is not the notion immediately consti-
tutive of its meaning."
10
One thus has to disregard the continually changing individual meaning of the
index word "I" when accomplishing the phenomenological reduction of the objec-
LECTURE 26 419
tivity of signification (of a sentence that is introduced by "I" as its grammatical
subject). "I," as a name for a constantly changing reality, has no place in the
framework of a phenomenology taken as a rigorous science of essenceand it
likewise has no place in a scientifically conceived theory of language. Both of
these sciences are concerned with ideal objects.
An ideal object is an object whose showing may be repeated
indefinitely, whose presence to Zeigen is indefinitely reiterable
precisely because, freed from all mundane spatiality, it is a pure
noema that I can express without having, at least apparently, to
pass through the world. . . . The ideal object is the most objective
of objects; independent of the here-and-now acts and events of
the empirical subjectivity which intends it, it can be repeated infinitely
while remaining the same. (SP, 75)
Individuality thus can be phenomenologically reduced: it never offers itself to an
originary-presencing intuition; it is essentially nonideal and nonobjective. (One
could fittingly designate it as essenceless, something that in a more profound
sense it in fact is; this it has in common with Being in the sense of existence, which
is likewise systematically excluded from Husserfs phenomenology.) Science and
the linguistic system, which is indebted to science's axiomatics, have no place for
individuality in the framework of their universalizing operations. Individuality is
the disrupter par excellence of "thinking" (as it was defined by Frege).
11
That is also true for Derrida's position. Even if one does not link iterability
with the law of identity, it remains true, Derrida concludes, that all rule-governed
and repeatable speech includes two moves of distancing: it removes the reference
and the respective speaking subject. And it does this not in contradiction to the
tendency for idealization, which we know as the implication of the structure of
repetition, but rather as its consequence.
My nonperception, my nonintuition, my hic et nunc absence are
expressed by that very thing that I say, by that which I say and he-
cause I say it. This structure will never form an "intimately blended
unity" with intuition. The absence of intuition and therefore of the
subject of the intuition is not only tolerated by speech; it is required
by the general structure of signification, when considered in itself. It is
radically requisite: the total absence of the subject and object of a
statement the death of the writer and/or the disappearance of
the objects he was able to describe does not prevent a text from
"meaning" something. On the contrary, this possibility gives
birth to meaning as such, gives it out to be heard and read. (93)
Let's disregard in this context the removal of the presence of objects, which Der-
rida cites as the constitutive feature of all speech (one can talk about objects in
their absence: the possibility of this abstraction in fact shapes the representational
420 n LECTURE 26
function of the word-sign). This is correspondingly true and this is the only as-
pect that interests us at the moment of the individuality of the speaking subject:
whoever speaks has to use words that show the same face to all speakers: their
transindividual understandability is founded on this. Even the expressions with
which I designate myself must, as expressions, be severable from the idiosyn-
cratic consciousness that is proper only to me and that is not communicable. What
Derrida calls idealization (or repetition, signification, and the death of the sub-
ject) means nothing other than that the sign, in order to open itself up to com-
municability with Others, has to free itself from the attachment to the "signifying
intention" of only One (singular) subject. Searle speaks in the same sense of
"forms of intentionality": they refer not to my or your but rather to the promising,
the threatening, the blessing, the commanding, etc. "I" is only a variable, an index
word, which in each instance designates the person who at that moment is per-
forming a speech act; however, it designates this person not as a singular being
but rather as one about whom statements that are capable of being true, or which
at least conform to convention, can be made.
Derrida agrees on this point with Searle as well as with Husserl. He even goes
further than the latter in that he challenges HusserFs view that "in solitary speech
the meaning of T is essentially realized in the immediate idea of one's own per-
sonality."
12
Is this certain? Even supposing that such an immediate representation is
possible and actually given, does not the appearance of the word / in
solitary speech (a supplement whose raison d'tre is not clear if im-
mediate representation is possible) already function as an ideality?
Doesn't it give itself out as capable of remaining the same for an I-here-
now in general, keeping its sense even if my empirical presence is
eliminated or radically modified? When I say /, even in solitary speech,
can I give my statement meaning without implying, there as always, the
possible absence of the object of speech-in this case, myself? (95)
In a word, "I" means {veut dire) not although the singular empirical "I" is (proba-
bly) not given in a presencing "living intuition," but because "I" is an ideality, a
nonpresence, a representamen par excellence. Depresencing is the condition of
possibility of its functioning as sign, i.e., as signifier.
Whether or not I have a present intuition of myself, T' expresses some-
thing; whether or not I am alive, I am "means something." Here also
the fulfilling intuition is not an "essential component" of expression.
Whether or not the / functions in solitary speech, with or without the
self-presence of the speaking subject, it is sinnvolL . . . The possibil-
ity of this nonintuition constitutes the Bedeutung as such, the normal
Bedeutung as such. When the word / appears, the identity of its Bedeu-
tung, inasmuch as it is distinct from its "object," puts us in what Hus-
LECTURE 26 D 421
serl describes as an abnormal situationjust as if / were written by
someone unknown. This alone enables us to account for the fact that we
understand the word / not only when its "author" is unknown but when
he is quite fictitious. And when he is dead. The ideality of the Bedeu-
tung here has by virtue of its structure the value of a testament. (95,
96)
Derrida believes that he can deduce this directly from Husserl's premises them-
selves ("it is Husserl's premises themselves that give rise to this astonishment.
Husserl continues, 'But since each person, in speaking of himself, says "I," the
word has the character of a universally operative indication of this fact' "; 95).
Meanwhile we know that Derrida subjects Husserl's (and correspondingly
Searle's) premises to a radical reinterpretation before he draws his conclusions.
For Husserl and that applies correspondingly to every view of language that
holds to the type-concept of the sign ideality of meaning is a place of unerodible
presence and self-identity (it is only the empirical individual whose signification
constantly changes). Searle's concept of conventionality has the same function
that Husserl's "principle of principles" serves (somewhat more speculatively,
more obviously "metaphysical"), namely, to guarantee that a speech-act type
brought into circulation remains the same even in repeated use. This view, as we
saw earlier, makes out of communication a game whose stakes are determined
in advance (except for the function of the accumulation of information on the part
of the addressee). The allegedly partner-related act of communication reveals it-
self to be a speculative monologue (the speakers and the listeners are exchange-
able functions, not individuals).
For Derrida, on the other hand, iterability is not subject to the axiom of the
(metaphysically conceived) self-present. Idealization, which gives rise to signi-
fications, must rather be conceived in the final analysis as depresencing: as diffr-
ance. It would bring little if one were to think of it as subjectivity, for precisely
also subjectivity conceived as self-contact is articulated by means of a differ-
ence whose suppression would simultaneously dissolve the signification of sub-
jectivity. In this sense difference proves to be irreducible. Even Husserl does not
completely elude this consequence: the living present is ultimately transformed
into an idea in the Kantian sense, i.e., into something that for its part can never
be realized in "living self-present" or given to an experience of consciousness,
into something nonintuitable and thus as a consequence of the metaphorical
connotation into something nonevident. (What is understandable to intuition on
its own accord is something "evident.") The demonstrations that show phenome-
nology to be a strict science are drawn from something in itself nondemonstrable,
from something ideal (in the emphatic sense of something unreal). If one
renounces the self-contradictory demand of bringing this "idea" into the "living
self-present," then a view opens up that allows us to see that the ideality of all
422 LECTURE 26
meaning and all signifying is grounded in the distancing of a founding subject and
in the depresencing of a principle: in a diffrance, conceived as absolute, which
is even the ground of the ground on the basis of which metaphysics (and the
science which is indebted to it) think.
The [diffrance] is not only the disappearance of origin-within the dis-
course that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means
that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted ex-
cept reciprocally by a nonorigin, the [diffrance], which thus becomes
the origin of the origin. . . .
The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which
amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense
in general. The trace is the differance which opens appearance [[ap-
paratre] and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving in
general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more
ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transpar-
ent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics
can describe it. (GR, 61, 65)
13
To be sure, the radicality of this consequence is impressive (even if it can no
longer surprise us), and I would like to add that it was nowhere developed as lu-
cidly and as patiently as in Speech and Phenomenathe book on which I would
bestow the prize if someone were to ask me to be the judge in a contest for the
best philosophical book produced by neostructuralism.
Meanwhile I have already expressed the opinion that I consider this radicality
to be excessive. It makes it not only difficult but rather even impossible that one
recognize what absolutely legitimate motive drove Husserl to seek refuge in that
"idea in the Kantian sense." This motive consisted in the fact that there is some-
thing like the experience of the unity of self-consciousness in spite of the uner-
adicable and unsublateable difference in the notion of the self-present and of "self-
affection." It is not true that whoever refers "time" to the concept of unity con-
ceives it metaphysically, that in a countermove against metaphysics one would
have to conceive it based on the insight that even within self-contact a difference
resides (SP, 69). Even if one takes all of Derrida's arguments as a basis, time can-
not be conceived without taking account of its unifying function, which runs
counter to its differential activity. Time, Sartre says in this sense, is differentia-
tion of a particular kind: "a division which reunites" (BN, 131). Whoever would
not take this unifying activity into account would have to consider time to be a
result of moments existing in themselves and completely external to one another,
none of which would give me the idea of relating them to each other. Certainly,
the opposite thought, which holds that an extratemporal " think" is impressing
its unity onto what is temporally unconnected, without time itself being eternal-
ized or, inversely, thinking being temporalized, is just as untenable. But the un-
LECTURE 26 423
tcnability of this strictly opposite position (which could with some justification
be called "metaphysical") does not make the position taken by Derrida tenable.
If diffranee were in fact absolute, then this extreme consequence would simul-
taneously bring with it the consequence that the idea of relation would be annulled
(and it is on the basis of this that the differentiality of the sign system is built).
If Derrida is correct in emphasizing that the interwovenness of the consciousness
of the present (in Husserl) with the retentional-protentional experiences of con-
sciousness fractures the identity of the "living present," then it also remains true
that this interwovenness forms a net - a text, a texture-in which the nonidentical
present is rescued from its dissolution into mere nonbeing: unity, which as strict
self-present and identity proved untenable, now resurfaces as a concept of rela-
tion. Schelling demonstrated very convincingly that the time dimension has to be
understood on the one hand as a "division" of moments "freed from" unity, but
on the other hand as a division that "nevertheless always remains one in this
tension they can never be absolutely separated, so that never even for a moment
could one be for itself. On the contrary, they are constantly posited as one in their
separation, and it is precisely this that places them into the necessity of the proc-
ess; for if they could be totally separated, then there would be no process" (SW,
II/2, 206).
Applied to Derrida: a minimal continuity is indispensable so that diffrent sign
use can continue to be describable as the repeated succession of the same apo-
smes. The expression "non-present remaining of a differential mark" (Margins,
318) i.e., the acknowledgment of a minimal remainder, not of meaning, but of
the marque seeks to take this into account. Derrida does this even more clearly
in Limited Inc.
The remainder . . . is bound up with the minimal possibility of the re-
mark . . . and with the structure of iterability. This iterability . . .
supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of idealization) in
order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and identifiable in,
through, and even in view of its alteration. For the structure of
iteration-and this is another of its decisive traits-implies both identity
and difference. (189-90)
This coexistence of identity and difference in the process of temporization is
called its continuity. Continuity implies change (otherwise we would have a static
present: a nunc stans, a permanence), but it implies change within the framework
of a unity. To be sure, this unity is constantly differentiated anew and in every
moment challenged and broken down as the unity it, in each instance, is. But,
we have to add, this occurs in order that new, and just as provisional unities can
be constructed. There is absolutely no return to a prior unity that in Hegel's
terms could be identified as the absolute in the state of its Being-in-itself from
the perspective of its goal; no, unity is never originary (in the sense that it can
4Z4 U Lt H~ 1 UKC ZO
only be looked upon ad infinitum as the modification of a prior unity), and it is
never substantial (remaining: barely identified, it is challenged in anticipation of
a new conception of unity). On the other hand, there is also no complete destruc-
tion of unity such that the singular phases would no longer entertain a relationship
with each other. As Derrida correctly remarks, this would mean that one could
no longer determine its iterative characterthe recurrence of elements that simul-
taneously carry the index of change, but of a change that occurs within the frame-
work of continuity.
This absurdity, however, seems to me to be a consequence not so much of Der-
rida's intention as of his conclusion. It no longer allows us to make out since
differance is posited as absolute what distinguishes the reproduction of signs
inasmuch as it is no longer in the service of a self-present that functions as a
regulative principlefrom the unfettered chaos of unconnected "effects of mean-
ing" (apart from the fact that such a chaos, particularly as the place where mean-
ing is produced, is simply a nonthought). One can most convincingly bring Der-
rida into difficulties with the tu quoque argument that Plato's dialogues and many
of Aristotle's writings utilize. By means of this argument one demonstrates "that
anyone who disputes certain conditions of reasoning, must already have ac-
knowledged these conditions in order to be able to challenge them, and thus ar-
gues in a pragmatically inconsistent way."
14
In order to be able to conceive itera-
bility as the condition of possibility for subjectivity and meaning
15
for ideality
at all-Derrida has to avail himself of the continuity (and thus the framing unity)
of the process. He justifiably does so, in my opinion; but then the thrust of his
argument is parried, or it can at best be sustained only at the price of self-
contradiction. For to the extent that Derrida reminds Husserl's "living present"
that the prefix re- in the expression "reproduction" (SP, 63ff., 66ff.) (as well as
in "repetition" and "representation") presupposes the loss of a seamless self-
identity of "primordial experience," he for his part has to be reminded by
Husserl - and the cited passage from Limited Inc acknowledges this as such - that
the loss of the self-presence of primordial experience can be marked only within
the framework of a continual process of iteration, whose formulation in the prefix
re in the term "remarque" indicates a "minimal identity" as something that cannot
be theoretically relinquished.
This results, it seems to me, in a series of consequences that all have in com-
mon that they can no longer be addressed within the theoretical framework of ne-
ostructuralism. They call for a hermeneutics of meaning and of the individual.
Lecture 27
Two lectures ago we discussed Derrida's criticism of Searle's concept of the sign,
and in the last lecture we examined his position regarding Husserl's concept of
the sign. Although I have made an effort to highlight the conceptual continuity
between his arguments against Searle and those against Husserl, this still always
occurs in each case in specific contexts that, each according to its own perspec-
tive, made the universality of Derrida's approach clear. Because I consider Der-
rida's arguments to be both complicated as well as significant, I now want to try
to reconstruct the essential steps of his critical attack, independent of the refer-
ence to Searle and Husserl.
Derrida forces those theoreticians concerned with the systematic constraining
of utterances (i.e., of pragmatically interpreted propositions) in a taxonomy of
rules to consider that the iterability of utterances, like that of signs generally, is
a structural possibility of rule-governed speech. However, in a countermove to
the idea of a transtemporal order of speech, Derrida questions the legitimacy of
the conclusion that in a functioning grammatical taxonomy every repetition of a
sign or of an utterance is necessarily the repetition of the same.
According to him, there is no preestablished copresence of author and reader,
or of speaker and listener; indeed, strictly speaking, neither the author nor the
speaker is ever copresent with what he or she writes or says. For the uttered signs
can become elements of an individual message, i.e., types, faits socials, only un-
der the condition that the speaker's/writer's intention drops off, as it were, from
the signification of the uttered signs: the individual retreats in its singularity in
order to make room for the universality of the system. This suspension of in-
426 LECTURE 27
dividual meaning, however, has the countereffect of making the signs free to take
up another (other than) individual interpretation.
From this we can infer that as soon as codified types are exchanged, it must
principally be possible-but this does not mean always and in all cases
1
to re-
place their first or originary articulation/interpretation with a second one, and
thus to depart from convention (which is merely virtual anyway, and is constantly
annulled by real speech). Derrida calls this the "remarque": the constant possibil-
ity for the speaker, the author, the reader, or the interpreter to mark anew the
meaning of a word or sentence.
This possibility, in its turn, follows from the temporality of speech that under-
mines the notion of the copresence of sender and receiver, just as it undermines
that of the synchrony of concept and image acoustique/graphique. Every form
of "being-present-with" (Gegenwartig-sein-bei) has the structure of a differentia-
tion: something is with something else, and something is after something else.
The meaning of a sign or an utterance is separated from itself by every new usage,
it is displaced: who can prove that after passing through the gap of iteration mean-
ing is joined in the same synthesis with its expressive substratum as at the be-
ginning?
This etymology, of course, has no value qua proof and were it to be
false, the very shift in meaning would confirm the law here indicated:
the time and place of the other time already at work, altering from the
start the start itself, the first time, the at once. (LI, 200)
Saussure expressed a similarly radical idea in the posthumously published Notes:
What has escaped philosophers and logicians here is that, from the mo-
ment a system of symbols is independent of the objects designated, it
was itself subject to undergoing, by virtue of time, displacements that
are incalculable for the logician. (EC, II, 23)
But there is a further and more unsettling consequence that Derrida's "rigorous
and renewed analysis of the value of presence, a presence to self or to others, of
difference and of diffrance" (LI, 186) recommends language philosophers to
draw. It is not only the repeated sign, he says, that cannot guarantee its identity,
but rather even the sign that was only used once. How come? you will ask. Be-
cause, Derrida answers, semiological orders-e. g. , texts, discourses, orienta-
tions in the life world, traditional contexts, etc.can endow their elements with
signification only by distinguishing each singular element from all others. But one
can justifiably maintain about something that can only secure its identity over the
detour through all other identities that it is separated from itself. For its self is
a function of the incalculably open number of all the other sign uses I settle on
over the course of an interpretive process and delimit from it by means of dis-
tinction.
LECTURE 27 G 427
I would like to portray this thought that seeks to reconcile the notion of the
systematic composition of texts with the idea of their historicity and uninterpreta-
bility. Since it is quite complicated (and foreign, at least in a German-speaking
context), I have decided to approach it in a new way, and I hope I will be excused
for repeating things that were already said in other contexts. If meaning and sig-
nificance are produced in the interrelation of different expressive substances, then
the identity of a term could be guaranteed only if the system is in a state of closure
and unalterability. The model that underlies both the structural theory of language
and texts, as well as Searle's "taxonomy of speech acts" (at least implicitly), is,
as we know, the crystal lattice in which all molecules are immovably fixed in their
positions, if the temperature is sufficiently low, separated from all the others, but
also connected with them. In contrast to the elemental world, the historical-
cultural world cannot simply be cooled down to the absolute freezing point (even
if all the efforts of the politicians in East or West have the purpose of trying to
bring it to this). Language and literature thrive only in a certain warmth that per-
mits flux: the exchange and reconstellation of signs. Texts are always transforma-
tions of other and former texts, just as signs are always new articulations of other
and former signs (cf. P, 26-27; EC, I, 160). Why? Because it is simultaneously
settled-by means of the thought of differentiation-that no sign is immediately
and atemporally present to itself, since it has to take the detour over an incalcula-
ble and changing configuration of other signs before it can identify itself. If one
in addition comes to understand that this detour runs through infinity, then one
has renounced the scientistic idea that there is something like an originary, atem-
poral presence, one that can be reconstituted by means of textual analysis or dis-
course analysis, or a familiarity of at least one meaning with and by itself (as,
for example, is suggested by Greimas's concept of sens total or sens central)', and
there certainly is no such self-presence or self-familiarity of the sort that I as-
suredly would find my way back to as the signifi transcendantalno matter
what paths I happen to take across signs. The paradigm of reflection (of the
speculative return to the point of departure, something that one also recognizes
in the notion of a "reconstruction of the original meaning of the word or the origi-
nally signified intention," which was preserved even through to speech-act the-
ory) does not stand up to the experience of an unlimited economy of semantic op-
positions.
Lacan's famous essay "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" had al-
ready provided us with some information about the nature of this experience. La-
can spoke of an "incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" (, 154).
The expression "signifier" is undoubtedly incorrectly chosen, for, as Derrida has
shown us, the signifier is always only the nonautonomous correspondent of the
integral reality of the sign that encompasses it. A signifier is itself an ideality, es-
sentially defined by and constituted in view of the signified (S/\ 76). It therefore
would be self-contradictory to believe that the signified could slide under the sig-
428 G LECTURE 27
nifier, for, as Saussure repeatedly emphasized, the sign can only change as a
whole (thus as signifier-signified). It is for this reason that he later called the, as
it were, remaining and nonideal part "under" the sign aposme: the word hull that
allows material-empirical embodiment for the (through and through ideal) sign,
without itself entering into the regions of designation (of semiosis). Lacan's thesis
can thus be understood quite well if one interprets the term signifier as aposme
throughout his work. For of course the word hull of a sign can endure, while the
sign itself (Lacan says: its meaning) semantically slides.
According to Lacan, this sliding arises from the principal (or, let's say, struc-
tural) impossibility of nailing, so to speak, what he calls the signified to what he
calls the signifier. To be sure, one can enumerate the rules of grammar and those
of the lexicon, but no rule of conjunction or semantic-lexicological definition is
capable of accounting in advance for all configurations in which the sign can in
fact be used. Now Saussure's principal insight, to which Lacan appeals (E [Fr.
d.], 497), is that the signification of a sign is differentially determined: in the
contrast to its neighboring signs (which Saussure calls parasmes). According to
Lacan, this insight categorically excludes the thought of the closure and fixedness
of the lexical-grammatical repertoire (the batterie signifiante). It can never be cal-
culated in advance which group of parasmes will in fact determine the semantics
of a sign or a sign chain in a historically singular contextual constellation. The
meaning of a signifier (as Lacan understands the term) is always defined as an
open function (of future, and as such of at present incalculable) contexts. Lacan
characterizes this fact that every signifier is referred to an open field of semantic
determination on the basis of contexts ("only the correlations between signifier
and signifier provide the standard for all reasearch into signification") as the antic-
ipation of meaning: "the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning
by unfolding its dimension before it" (, 153). The range of this anticipation can-
not be grammaticaliy-lexically limited in advance.
According to Lacan, a second circumstance supervenes that ensures that the
identification of meaning according to lexicon and grammar is impossible. That
is the fact that the meaning of a statement is always the meaning the other intends
with it. Speech is, unless it is viewed as the speculative monologueas parole
vide of the solitary soul with itself, essentially dialogic and interindividual. But
that means that the linguistic code, to the extent that it guarantees this interin-
dividual and transindividual dimension of meaning, is totally withdrawn from and
unreachable by the individuality of my registerings of meaning. The meaning of
expressions is thus not determinable by means of my own linguistic competence,
and that applies correspondingly and inversely for the Other. Lacan concludes
from this:
What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I
have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other
LECTURE 27 D 429
subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in
order to signify something quite other than what it says. (155)
This feature of all speech to displace incalculably the meaning of terms in usage
(emploi, Lacan says [", 153]) comes into view in poetically wrought language
as such. Meaning is undecidable, not only on the basis of language's intersubjec-
tivity, which, as it were, takes away from me the monopoly of meaning attribu-
tion and democratizes it; and it is not only undecidable by virtue of the fact that
every endowment of significance is open to the future (which relativizes the
masterability of a sign in anticipation of a still unknown sign constellation); there
is, finally, something like a social and contextual memory of signs that incalcula-
bly complicates their monosemy. Lacan speaks of former contexts that have been,
as it were, vertically attached to the sign and dragged along by it as former con-
texts, and these contexts help determine the horizontal and differential reference
to its neighboring sign. The sign preserves the trace of all its former uses; no lexi-
con could ever give sufficient information about these. These layers of meaning
(which originate from the contexts and discursive connections that the signs in
question passed through at some earlier time), dragged along by the signs, as it
were, beneath their surface, are systematically exploited by poetic language.
One has only to listen to poetry, which Saussure was no doubt in the
habit of doing, for a polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that
all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score.
There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if at-
tached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of
relevant contexts suspended "vertically," as it were, from that point.
(154)
Lacan imaginatively illustrates how this can happen on the example of the sig-
nifier tree (arbre). It is freed from its nominal isolation as lexeme and put in all
kinds of relations which playfully exploit not only its symbolic but also its
phonic and graphic substancethat later can no longer be separated from an al-
legedly "authentic signification" of the lexeme. What "tree" actually signifies can-
not be made out: significance is plural inasmuch as it is semantically charged with
secondary significations (parasmes).
Let us take our word "tree" again, this time not as an isolated noun, but
at the point of one of these punctuations, and see how it crosses the bar
of the Saussurian algorithm. (The anagram of "arbre" and "barre"
should be noted.)
For even broken down into the double spectre of its vowels and con-
sonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the signi-
fication it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesty.
Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggested in the Hebrew of the
Bible, it erects on a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reduces
430 D LECTURE 27
to the capital Y, the sign of dichotomy which, except for the illustration
used by heraldry, would owe nothing to the tree however genealogical
we may think it. Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of
Saturn, tree of Diana, crystals formed in a tree struck by lightning, is it
your figure that traces our destiny for us in the tortoise-shell cracked by
the fire, or your lightning that causes that slow shift in the axis of being
to surge up from an unnamable night into the of Ev7cdvxa language.
(154-55)
Derrida's theorem of the dissminai character of the sign is undoubtedly pro-
foundly influenced by Lacan's observations on semantics. There is, nevertheless,
a gap, which cannot be overlooked, between their respective views that Derrida
likes to emphasize, and which, in his partly admiring and partly polemical analy-
sis of the Sminaire sur "la lettre vole " led him to count Lacan among the her-
meneutical thinkers (in proximity to Ricoeur).
2
Here Derrida claims that Lacan
has revised the classical view of hermeneutics, according to which an "authentic
meaning" hides underneath the textual surface in order to let itself finally be redis-
covered by that circular movement that hermeneutics takes as the process of in-
terpretation. Instead of this, the lack, which Lacan defines as subjectivity, takes
up residence at exactly the place that classically was occupied by the "transcen-
dental signified" or by the "principle of principles." However, this lack, Derrida
ironically remarks, is lacking precisely at its proper place ("The signifier is miss-
ing from its place"),
3
and analytical hermeneutics finds it at the end of a circle
that itself could be called hermeneutical, namely, at the place of "authenticity" and
"truth."
4
The letter was sent from a place and arrived at a place. It is not a sub-
ject but a void the lack out of which the subject is constituted. The con-
tour of this void is determinable and magnetizes the entire trajectory of
the detour which leads from void to void and from the void to itself and
which has, therefore, a circular form. This is a regulated circulation
which organizes a return from the detour to the void, and a transcen-
dental reappropriation and readequation which accomplish an authentic
contract. . . . Circulation, the payment [acquittement] of a debt, steps
in to repair the dehiscence which, by opening the debt and the contract,
expelled for a time (the time of the signifier) the signified from its
proper origin. Circulation allows it to return. This readequation (the
truth), therefore, implies a theory of the proper place which itself im-
plies a theory of the letter as an indivisible locality. The signifier should
never venture an unreturning loss, destruction or shredding of itself.
. . . In spite of the appearance of dngation, his is a hermeneutical
decipherment.
5
For Lacan the authentic has been transformed from a self-referential positive fact
to a reference of lack to itself (le propre tant devenu le rapport du manque lui-
LECTURE 27 431
mme),
6
interpretation thus consists in an entirely traditional fashion in fol-
lowing the trail of this reference.
7
In the end, the effort involved in this detour
is rewarded by the certitude of the represencing of the origin in the sense of
Hegelian sublation} According to this scheme, "the dissminai structure, i.e.,
the no-possible-return of the letter, the other scene of its remnance [restance]"
is misconstrued.
9
As stimulating as it would be to test Derrida's alternative proposal on Poe's text
itself, we have to concentrate on the fundamental aspect of Derrida's objection.
One can immediately see what he is getting at without going deeply into details.
Lacan's hermeneutics, according to Derrida, does not radically break with the
thought of the semantic identifiability of the signifier; it orients interpretation
around the criterion of truth and authenticity, and these are epitomized in the idea
of the "true subject." Analogous to Hegel's idea of the autonomy of negation,
which goes hand in hand with a philosophy of the absolute, Lacan's conception
of a detoured self-identification of lack finds its way back to a (vacant but,
nevertheless, a) place of truth.
There is something to this. I have shown elsewhere that it is in fact not inap-
propriate to speak of a hermeneutics in the case of Lacan,
10
and that Lacan him-
self does not scorn the label of interpreter or hermeneuticist. In The Four Fun-
damental Concepts of Psychoanalysis he very clearly drew the line that separates
his psychoanalytical hermeneutics from the thought of dissminai reading. There
he says:
It is false to say, as had been said, that interpretation is open to all
meanings under the pretext that it is a question only of the connection
of a signifier to a signifier, and consequently of an uncontrollable con-
nection. Interpretation is not open to any meaning. This would be to
concede to those who rise up against the character of uncertainty in
analytic interpretation that, in effect, all interpretations are possible,
which is patently absurd. The fact that I have said that the effect of in-
terpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud's
own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself
nonsense.
Interpretation is a signification that is not just any signification. It
comes here in the place of the s and reverses the relation by which the
signifier has the effect, in language, of the signified. It has the effect of
bringing out an irreducible signifier. One must interpret at the level of
the 5, which is not open to all meanings, which cannot be just anything,
which is a signification, though no doubt only an approximate one.
11
Let's disregard the theory of metaphor that Lacan addresses in these sentences and
concentrate on two statements: first, that interpretation is not arbitrary, but that
it can miss its signified; second, that it has the structure of an approximation, i.e.,
of a conjecture that cannot definitively identify its object. In this way one can
432 D LECTURE 27
simultaneously assert two things about it: interpretation is not simply a criterion-
less helter-skelter of meaning attributions; nevertheless, it is neither objective nor
definitive. Both statements can be reconciled if one understands identification,
which is absolutely necessary for the attribution of meaning, as nonfinal. In this
way both statements are granted: first, that interpretation, as Schleiermacher
says, is "an infinite task because it is something infinitely past and infinitely future
that we want to see in the words" (HuK, 94). This, by the way, is absolutely in
keeping with Lacan, according to whom speech drags along the past of its former
contexts and anticipates a still unspecified future of signification. Second, it is fur-
ther conceded that the infinitude of interpretation does not put an end to the sig-
nifying of signs, but rather merely characterizes meaning as something prelimi-
nary and impermanent.
If one were to take Derrida's antihermeneutics seriously in all its radicality,
one would have to conclude that the dissminai character of signs their total
nonpresence not only would make endurable signification impossible for them,
but also would prohibit their signification at any point at all. That, to be sure,
would be an absurdity that could be maintained only by going contrary to the ex-
perience of speaking and understanding. But, as a matter of fact, Derrida's po-
lemics against Husserl's and Searle's and-as it turns out - Lacan's notion of a cer-
tain presence of signs has, at its most pointed, precisely this consequence. If it
is supposed to follow from the thought of diffrance that interpretation is no
longer possible at all, then the category of "meaning" is completely deprived of
its basis for existence. Difference would be totalitarian and would break down
meaning (instead of multiplying meaning, as in Lacan and Schleiermacher).
In fact, however, difference could never be absolute in the sense that the state-
ment "everything is difference" could be upheld. First, the term diffrance would
be meaningless if no other term were joined with it to provide for a distinction
(in this context, the term "identity"); second, the mechanism of differentiation
could not be understood if the related elements were to be detached from the refer-
ence that relates them to one another. If the relation of difference has to be under-
stood as one of (determined) negation, and if the operation of negation, following
Peirce, can be defined as an operation of distinction (something is negated when
it is determined by being different than . . .), then diffrance is not only dividing
but also uniting. Put trivially, something can only differ from something else
(something determined). Otherness is therefore a relational concept that has
something in common with that whose other it designates. Fichte formulated this
particularly lucidly in his commentaries on the third principle of his first Science
of Knowledge:
Every opposite is like its opponent in one respect, = X; and every like
is opposed to its like in one respect, = X. Such a respect, = X, is
called the ground, in the first case of conjunction* and in the second of
LECTURE 27 433
distinction: for to liken or compare opposites is to conjoin them; and to
set like things in opposition is to distinguish them.
12
In other words, difference is never total but rather always partial. (It occurs within
the framework of a continuous field of "divisibility.") If it were conceived as total,
then it would detach itself from that from which it differs; i.e., it would cease to
be a difference.
This insight (as trivial as it is) actually seems to have been taken into considera-
tion in Derrida's idea of the remaining mark (marque restante) and the "minimal
identity" a sign has to preserve over the process of its incalculable differentia-
tions. But how can this consideration be justified, at least on the basis of his the-
ory, and particularly on the basis of his polemics against Lacan?
Obviously, it cannot be justified through the claim that the marque is by nature
identical with itself (or continuous). To assume this would mean to fall into the
"naturalist fallacy/' which Saussure demonstrated to be operable in the "Young
Grammarians," and which consists in the belief that natural sounds in themselves
are disposed toward the introduction of significations, and that one can conceive
of signs as "physical entities." The empirical substrate becomes the carrier of sig-
nification in every sign synthesis only as soon as one interprets it as a signifier,
i.e., actually relates it to a possible meaning within the framework of a rela-
tional structure. If this relation cannot be understood as that of a "natural connec-
tion" (and Saussure's linguistic approach draws its theoretical strength primarily
from the persuasive refutation of this view), the only other possibility is that one
has to conceive it as the result of a hypothetical judgment of an "abduction" in
Peirce's sense. We will investigate its mechanism in a moment. In our present
context it is enough to eviscerate the view that with the "minimal identity of a re-
maining mark" that of a natural sound or of a writing trace could be meant.
If the mark only first distinguishes itself and identifies itself as that which it
is by the fact that a meaning is hypothetically assigned to it (no identification
without signification!), then it is impossible to say, inversely, that meaning is
generated out of the mark or out of the relations which it entertains with other
marks. Differentiality is certainly a necessary prerequisite for the production of
meaning, but it reveals to me the meaning of what was distinguished only under
the circular precondition that I ascribe it to the marks in a motivated, yet freely
interpretive attribution. A system of marks distinguished "in themselves" would
always remain something natural, much like the constellation of molecules in a
crystal is something natural. In order to be able to understand relations of marks
as segments of a symbolic (nonnatural) order, I have to provide them with a
meaning-to whatever extent motivated by the framework of the structure itself.
And this meaning as nonnecessitated by the natural side of the sounds, traces,
and connectionscan only be the result of a free interpretive attribution. (To as-
sume "a little bit of freedom," in order to acknowledge the conditioned character
434 LECTURE 27
of the pregiven order, would not be much more intelligent than thinking that one
is "a little bit pregnant.")
Let's underline the essential point of this still entirely preliminary deliberation:
in order to be characterized even only vaguely as a "remaining mark," the mark
must have been assigned a meaning. But if assignment of this meaning is the con-
dition under which I can first speak of the unity of the mark at all, then one would
necessarily commit a petitio principii if one wanted to pass off meaning, for its
part, as something determined by the "effect of the mark." In order to be able to
exert this meaning-determining effect, the markprior to all meaning would
have to be composed unitarily. But what could a mark prior to all meaning be,
other than a natural object? To assume that natural objects are "distinct in them-
selves" would mean to fall victim to the "naturalist illusion" whose decisive rejec-
tion first opens up the field on which a structuralist and neostructuralist theory
of signs is possible.
To be sure, Derrida problematizes the unity of the mark that subsists in itself
by adding that it is a nonpresent one (restance nonprsente de la marque). If one
reads the predicate "nonpresent" in the extreme significance of "bare of every re-
lation to identity," then one not only repeats the indicated absurdity but also strips
the term restance of precisely that function for whose sake it was introduced,
namely, the function of securing for the sign a "minimal identity."
Nonprsente, however, can be interpreted less extremely and more meaning-
fully than as "withoutpermanent identity." That would be an explication reconcil-
able with Humboldt's statement that the meaning of a sign acquires "no permanent
place," and especially not in writing. To have no permanent place, however, does
not mean to have no meaning at all. In order to have a meaning, writing (or the
marque) has to be interpreted again and again. "Again and again" is supposed to
express that the unity, into which a given interpretation places the meaning to-
gether with its expression, is not permanent but remains relative to the act of em-
ployment. Other acts of employment will determine the semantics of the sign
differently. But this otherness will not be absolute (simply because "absolute
otherness" is a nonthought whose signification does not understand itself),
but rather relative. An "othering" (Veranderung) (to use the term Rosenkranz
coined), whose degree of alteration is measured according to the extent of modi-
fication it effected on a state of sign synthesis prior to it, can be characterized as
determined othering. Here the word "determined," in relation to a new sign syn-
thesis, means that it let itself be motivated by its antecedent. One designates as
"motivation" a manner of founding (Begrundung) that connects to its ground only
if it has previously disclosed it as ground in light of an interpretation; conse-
quences that are not blindly necessitated, but that relate (freely) to their cause,
are motivated. In this sense the semantic transformation of a sign is motivated:
since the meaning of the preceding sign itself subsisted only by virtue of a
hypothetical judgment (in itself, i.e., in its bare naturalness, the mark has no
LECTURE 27 435
meaning at all, as we saw), this sign's unity of meaning cannot semantically deter-
mine a second use of this sign. On the other hand, the first sign use naturally re-
mains the antecedent of the second one, in the sense that since the signification
of the first consisted in a hypothesis, this hypothesis can and even must be in-
cluded by a second hypothesis as the motivating force in its own projection.
"Must" means here that the second hypothesis is not simply free to determine its
antecedent. "Can" means that the first introduction of meaning does not have to
be continued in the second on the basis of a kind of natural causality. In this way,
a continuity would be set up between consecutive interpretations of a sign. This
continuity-which is not a continuity in the evolutionary sense, but rather a con-
tinuity of hypothetical judgments that motivate each othercould legitimate the
notion of a "remaining nonpresent of a differential mark," although on a different
theoretical level than the one suggested by Derrida. There would be a remainder
insofar as one and the same aposme (about whose sameness, to be sure, one has
hermeneutically-hypothetically to judge again and again) would be open to an in-
definite number of consecutive inscriptions of meaning. This chain would be non-
present because no inscription would have to continue with identical meaning and
form in the (temporally) following one, so that the self-presence of its signifying
forms an instant unity that is clouded by no difference.
In the context of the sign chain or chain of interpretation, I speak of continuity
or motivation. The former term I understand in the sense of Peirce's synechism,
i.e., as the connectedness and cohesiveness of a succession of conclusions in the
unity of "one and the same process of the growth of reasonableness."
13
And this
connectedness will necessarily have to be continuous, for the phases of the
process the perceptual judgments by virtue of which I am able at all to recognize
, something as something and to place it into relation with something elseare con-
stituted in light of (linguistic) interpretations and in the continuous unity of an
(open) stream of consciousness. Only in a world that is already linguistically in-
terpreted can differences be constituted and connections established between ele-
ments. This interpretation, which is always already presupposed in every draw-
ing of conclusions and in every meaning (Meineri) of something as something,
makes my world into a continuum. This is how it is formulated in one of the fa-
mous cotary propositions with which Peirce, in his lectures in 1903 on prag-
matism, sought to "put the edge on" his philosophy (Coll P, V, 112). On the basis
of the continuity of our stream of consciousness, in which "instants melt into
one another without separate individuality," we are justified in abductively-
hypothetically inferring the possible "generality" of our judgments (Coll P, V,
127). "Continuity is an indispensable element of reality, and . . . continuity is
simply what generality becomes in the logic of relatives" (Coll P, V, 291).
If the relation that mediates between the linguistically interpreted "perceptual
judgments" can be determined as continuity, then the form of causality that medi-
ates between the elements can be more precisely defined as a motivated inference.
436 D LECTURE 27
Motivation is not causation or necessitation. A fact would be necessitated (to use
the terminology of the position that Peirce ridicules as necessitarianism [Coll P,
VI, 28-45]), if, on the basis of given empirical causes, it could not possibly not
occur. A motive, by contrast, designates a reason (Grund) that would be able to
determine my actions only in light of an interpretation that would disclose it as
the reason for this action.
14
An impetus to an action that unfolds its effectiveness
only by virtue of an interpretation (a final idea, for example), which acknowl-
edges and qualifies it as reason, cannot be conceived as the causal basis for an
action. Moreover, even physical causes (Ursachen) are in the final analysis rea-
sons (Grande), in the sense that the mode of Being of the physical is disclosed
as that which it is by means of perceptual judgments (and thus by means of in-
terpretations). Even the laws of mechanics are nothing but motivated inferences
on the basis of perceptual judgments whose hypothetical, and thus hermeneutical,
character can never be overcome and should never be overcome, because, if it
were to vanish, then the understandability of the world in which we observe how
mechanical laws operate would vanish with it. The dream of necessitarianism
would be to make
the whole action of the mind a part of the physical universe. . . . It
enters consciousness under the head of sundries, as a forgotten trifle; its
scheme of the universe would be more satisfactory if this little fact
could be dropped out of sight. On the other hand, by supposing the
rigid exactitude of causation to yield, . . . we gain room to insert
mind into our scheme, and to put it into the place where it is needed,
into the position which, as the sole self-intelligible thing, it is entitled to
occupy, that of the fountain of existence. (Coll P, VI, 42-43)
The continuous interpretive process (which refers hypothetically to unity, but is
uniform) thus cannot be understood if one simply eliminates the dimensions of
consciousness, praxis, and freedom, or if one declares it, with an overhasty
reasoning, to be an effect of the differential relations between marks. Hypotheti-
cal judgments can be made and motivations executed only within the dimension
of a prior consciousness. Inorganic and unconscious nature (according to all that
we know about it) knows neither hypotheses nor motivations. Neither, therefore,
can be derived from it as secondary effects, unless one presupposes the antici-
pated result (in a circular fashion).
I conclude from this that the recourse to individuality also should not simply
have been given up. For individuality as Derrida, along with Husserl, con-
cedesis an agency that offers resistance to the rigorous idealization of the mean-
ing of the signas something instantaneous and identical (i.e., it accomplishes pre-
cisely what is credited to diffrance). Individuality, further, has the advantage
over diffrance that it has to be conceived as self-conscious (i.e., that it
LECTURE 27 437
makes motivations and hypothetical judgments possible, this being what interpre-
tations are).
I would like to proposeand I gave detailed reasons for this proposal in Das
individuelle Allgemeinethat Derrida's diffrance be conceived as individuality.
It is not "primordially" diffrance, but rather the lment individuel that prevents
the sign synthesis from coinciding with itself in a transtemporai presence. This
noncoincidence, however, does not have the absurd result of causing the interpre-
tation of signs to become a gratuitous act, or even of completely thwarting it;
rather, it simply has the result of inserting signs into a continuum of nonidentical
hypothetical judgments that, however, are motivated by each other. "Nonidenti-
cal" means that no sign would be semantically identifiable in an extratemporal
sense: it stands, rather, in an openness to incalculable possibilities of interpreta-
tion. However, this incalculability of interpretations is not comparable to the
anarchy of blind caprice (which, strictly speaking, does not exist: there are rules
for running amok, just as there are for gratuitous acts, only they do not have the
same rules as those that structure the hundred-yard dash or a musical composition
according to a rigid scheme); it is not arbitrary, because each new interpretation
of a sign is the reinterpretation of a former sign use. No interpretation can be ab-
solutely new (the concept of absolute innovation is just as self-contradictory as
is that of absolute deviation or of absolute difference). The opposite of "absolute"
is "relative." Each new interpretation is relative to the interpretation whose inno-
vation it brings about; it will thus necessarily take over into itself traces of the
previous interpretation. The continuity of this trace, however, has nothing to do
with what Husserl calls "living present." For it is obvious that the chain of the
incalculable (new) interpretations of already interpreted marks cannot be in-
stantly represented or presenced in authentic intuition. The element of freedom,
which we tracked down in the idea of a motivated succession, while intelligible
as the action of an individuality capable of meaning, is notas free transgres-
sion-derivable from the signification the respective sign had up to that point. Un-
derstanding also does not consist in making a semantic deduction out of preestab-
lished premises (a certain state of signification of a language, for example);
rather, quite to the contrary, it consists in reproducing in a free and creative "divi-
nation" a motivated but grammatically-pragmatically incalculable transformation
of meaning as that which it is: as novation. The prefix re- in the expression
"reproduction" does not signify the return to a presumed authenticity of the origi-
nal meaning or that which was intended by the author (which, if it existed, would
only be hypothetically reconstructible, without the assurance of verifiability; and,
moreover, this meaning itself is transgressed by the author's meaning projection);
re means that I have to accomplish once more the creativity of the projected mean-
ing projection as such if I want to understand that, and to what extent, the in-
dividual moment cannot rest in the coincidence with the transgressed signification
(for logical reasons), but only in the disparity it produced between the old and
438 D LECTURE 27
the new signification. In this sense understanding is re- productive: ^accomplish-
ment not of the former signification, but of the meaning projection that deactual-
izes, depresences, and irremediably splits up the old signification in the projection
of a new one. The fact that understanding as opposed to that about which the
code model of conventionalized semantics/pragmatics dreams-principally lacks
final certainty about whether the meaning projection of the other individual has
in fact been hit upon, has to be evaluated positively rather than negatively. It ex-
presses that respect of the irreducible otherness of the other human being with
requisite radicality, much as it was demonstrated by Derrida in his remarks about
Husserl's "analogical appresentation": it is the nonpresence of the meaning of the
Other and of the Other meaning, its irreducibility to the presence of a "dator intui-
tion," which the idealization of the code model as well as the idealization of the
"eidetic reduction" destroy (SP, 39-40, 71). But how shall one destroy this ideali-
zation if one has previously denied the existence of the irreducibly Other meaning
and of the meaning-of-the-Other in one word, the individual and nonidentical
moment in every accomplishment of meaning as Derrida has? (Incomprehensi-
bly enough, he even implicitly formulates his argument following Husserl's and
Searle's demand for a sameness of signification that excludes the nonidentity of
individual meaning, which he, oddly enough, takes as "empirical." If the signi-
fication of "I" were to shift from utterance to utterance, he claims, the ideality of
this signification would be destroyed: "Doesn't it give itself out as capable of re-
maining the same for an I-here-now in general, keeping its sense even if my em-
pirical presence is eliminated or radically modified? . . . Doesn't speech [dis-
curs] and the ideal nature of every Bedeutung exclude . . . that a Bedeutung is
'ever altering'?" [SP, 95]). If one does not conceive the individual moment as
effluence or manifestation of an "empirical personality"which would be absurd,
inasmuch as one assumes (as if Peirce had never lived) that something empirical,
whether "subjective" or "objective," could be significant in itself-but rather as
that which it is: as the nonidentity of signifying in the process of a continuous
transformation of sign syntheses, then it sublates, it seems to me, all those accom-
plishments that Derrida ascribes to diffrance in itself and has the additional ad-
vantage of being able to explain a number of phenomena that the reductionism
of neostructuralist semantics fails to explain.
By way of conclusion I would like to show how well Derrida, with his view
that there is no semantic identity either of the single signs or of complex (conven-
tionally formed) expressions, could have appealed to the authentic Ferdinand de
Saussure, whom he, favoring the questionable vulgate version of the Cours,
never quotes. Saussure himself, on the one hand, contradicts the code model that
presupposes, in a completely acommunicative fashion, the identity of significa-
tions between speaker and listener; on the other hand, he founds the realizability
of the meaning of signs in a hermeneutics whose argumentative force was re-
LECTURE 27 D 439
pressed or went unrecognized, not only by the editors of the first printed version
of the Cours, but especially by Saussure's allegedly orthodox and structuralist fol-
lowers. For us the recourse to Saussure has the heuristic purpose of demonstrat-
ing once again that structuralism and hermeneutics do not have to be conceived
as mutually exclusive alternatives.
Saussure spoke of "a certain floating" between that which the prescripts of the
language system demand and that which is left up to the initiative of the speaking
individual (EC, I, 286). This has to do with the fact that in his view the values
of the language system always only unfold their meaning in actu; the language
system, however, has the modality of mere virtuality. In actu means in its succes-
sion, in the flow of speech, and thus over time. The unidimensionality of time
prevents me from performing two actualizations of one and the same sign in one
and the same expressive act; and it forces me to articulate my utterances at differ-
ent times and in different contexts (if there were contextual rules, it would auto-
matically be true of them that even they cannot anticipate and determine the sin-
gularity and actuality of the contextual situation in all its details). Time separates
the subject of the speaker from itself (and thus mars the idealization of expres-
sions by means of which the speaker designates him/herself); and it separates at
least as a possibility, but this possibility is a principal one the (former) significa-
tion of an expression from each of its future ones. (Writing only exemplifies this
experience, which we also make in everyday speech in an extreme form.)
In order to account for this experience of the "mutability of signs" language
philosophy needs a theory of the linguistic sign of the sort that simultaneously ex-
plains its intersubjective understandability (according to a semiotic key that
vouches for the "minimal identity" of the signs) and the nonidentity or noncontem-
poraneity of its message.
Now Saussure precisely did not contest his discovery of the systematic
constitution and the ideal characterof language (langue) with the idea of an
original identity of signs: "Everything [in langue] consists in differences" (CFS,
15 [1957], 16; see 93: "In langue, there is nothing but differences, no positive
quantity.") If nothing about the substance of sounds carries meaning in itself, he
holds up against the "naturalist illusion" of the "Young Grammarians," then the
unity and distinctness of a sign must be produced in a different fashion; namely,
on the basis of a cooperation between two principles that mutually supplement
and limit each other: the principle of temporal-linear succession and that of a
countermoving process of generalization (or idealization) that works counter to
the first. (Structuralism and the taxonomical linguistics of analytical philosophy
take cognizance of the latter only: the differences of the language system are
reduced to a finite number of oppositions in whose lattice time appears to stand
still. This view would be metaphysical in the sense that it would not abolish Hus-
serfs "principle of principles.")
Back to Saussure's two principles. On the basis of the first, the unidimensional-
440 D LECTURE 27
ity of the flow of time, the elements can distinguish themselves from each other:
the chane parle is founded ad infinitum on a relation of nonidentity, which Saus-
sure understands as the relation of an "other than." Given the term x, from which
a second one is distinguished as non-x (and is identified with y, for example), the
negation of the set of all x (thus the double negation of y) yields the continuum
of all units of sound that I can legitimately consider as "x."
15
This principle it is no other than a better-explicated version of the "principle
of difFerentiality," which we discussed at the beginning of our lecture series can
be designated more clearly by means of formalization. Since this is not my own
discovery, but part of an unpublished typescript that Christian Stetter was so kind
as to give me, I would like to quote him:
Linguistic sign synthesis is grounded in the principle of nonidentity. If
temporally different events in parole
^p ~~ * P ~~
X
P
are acknowledged to be realizations of an identical sign, then this is
possible only when each of these events is connected with the same se-
ries of rudimentary negations, in which the nonidentity of the figure
that represents the event to consciousness is established together with
all other elements of language. The transition from Xp
1
, x
p
2
, x
p
3
, etc.,
to xi, i.e., to an element of langue, is thus possible only if
Xp
1
-* ai A bi A ci A . . .,
x
p
2
- ai A - bi A - ci A . . .,
etc., and this in such a manner that none of these series of negations
may contain an element the other series do not contain.
We will soon see to what extent the inference from this scheme to a completed
and deductively derived identification of signs is problematic. Even the scheme
itself makes evident that the bare negativity of differentiation and lapse could
never guarantee the consciousness of unity and of iterability with the same mean-
ing of a linguistic type if there were not a principle of "memorization" or
"recollection of the successive phonatory units" that works toward an opposite
effect {EC, II, 39). This, thus, would be a principle that similar to Kant's "syn-
thesis of recognition"in memory holds on to the past element and the place of
its occurrence within the context of other elements. Saussure speaks of the recol-
ligibilit of elements (EC, II, 38). What is held on to, to be sure, cannot be the
elementor the configuration of elements (Gestalt) itself (they are past), but
only their placeholder: let's call it x', in conformity with Stetter's scheme. The dis-
LECTURE 27 D 441
tinguishing relation does not, as the code model overhastily presupposes, take
place between the elements x and x, but rather between the elements x and x\
between a past-recollected and a currently perceived element that now is inter-
preted as x.
You can see that Saussure's concept of linguistic valueas it was adopted mu-
tatis mutandis by the structuralists originally can by no means be understood as
the idea of a timeless-synchronous structure of elements that endurably delimit
each other by means of opposition like molecules in a crystal lattice. Just the op-
posite. Only over time i.e., as nonpresent can two values oppose one other
(EC, II, 38). The concept of value does not exclude that of time, but rather in-
cludes it: an element can be delimited and semantically identified only by being
followed in time, outside of its presenceby another one that consciousness
recognizes as nomdentical with the former element within the framework of a
stream of consciousness that is continuous and which connects its phases on the
basis of motivation. And that also applies for the memorized element itself: x' is
not by itself identical with x, by means of its sound configuration or acoustic na-
ture, for exampleprecisely that would be the "naturalist fallacy" but rather by
virtue of a creative interpretive operation.
This identity always includes an undefinable subjective element. The ex-
act point at which identity exists is always difficult to determine. (EC,
I, 243)
It is a matter of a hypothetical judgment for which no criteria other than her-
meneutical ones are available. In other words, because event and representative
of the event neither exist simultaneously nor are identifiable by means of their
sound configuration, an ampliative inference is needed (see Coll P, VI, 31-32)
that first founds the unity of signification (on the level of langue) by means of a
speaker's consciousness that itself cannot be derived from the rules of langue, and
which to this extent is transsemiological; and this inference occurs in such a way
that it is permanently renounceable and unstable like all nondeductive infer-
ences.
16
Schleiermacher, who probably was the first to point to this type of am-
pliative inference in the schematism of the formation and understanding of signs,
compared it to a work of art, "but it is not as if its execution would result in a
work of art, but rather in such a way that this activity only has the character of
art because the [grammatical] rules do not also provide their application, i.e.,
their application cannot be mechanized" (HuK, 81). "We call art," he explains,
"even in the narrow sense of the word, any composite production in which we
are cognizant of general rules whose application, for its part, cannot be reduced
to rules."
17
This definition clearly stands in close proximity to Kant's definition
of the reflecting (e.g., aesthetic) judgment that is always only looking for the con-
cept that could determine it, but which it for structural reasons cannot find.
The analogy between the hypothetical judgment of meaning attribution (in-
442 LECTURE 27
terpretation) and that of aesthetic judgment has often been emphasized since the
time of romantic hermeneutics and has been taken as the occasion for extended
observations. The semantic uninterpretability of works of art obviously demon-
strates in extreme form a characteristic of all speech, including everyday lan-
guage: its irreducibility to grammar and to the standard of the so-called normal
use of words. I would say that poetry expresses this in a radical form, but in fact
one can already show on the example of everyday speech that there is no exhaus-
tive understanding, even if one summons up all possible rules and prescripts. For
the number and order of oppositions that have to be kept apart from a sign or a
textual unit are not a priori determined. Their number can be incalculably ex-
panded by new possibilities of combination and by the hermeneutical imagination
of the recipient ("Creative activity will be but a combinatory activity the crea-
tion of new combinations"; EC, I, 386). As a consequence of this, the process
of semantic identification i.e., of interpretation can never be completely ex-
ecuted. The detour by way of the system of differences, by virtue of which I can
identify x' with x, leads into infinity. Interpretation therefore is always based on
that which Sartre calls a "comprehensive hypothesis": "The truth of this restitution
cannot be proven; its plausibility is not measurable" (IF, I, 56). Its validity has
to be certified always anew in social praxis by means, for example, of the ap-
proval of other listeners or of other interpreters.
For this reason, what in Saussure is called continuous transformation or alter-
ation of constituted significations is not a deficiency in linguistic theory but rather
the prerequisite for the idealization necessary in every theory. If the identity of
a sign or a sign chain is grounded in an interpretation these are Saussure's own
words: "Therefore there must be the first act of interpretation, which is active"
(CFS, 15 [1957], 89; cf. 92, 100); "analogic creation appears as . . . a
branch . . . of the general activity of interpretation, of the distinction of units"
(EC, I, 379) then interpretations of chains of signs or expressions can be moti-
vated, but not, as Schleiermacher says, "mechanized." One hence has to abandon
the illusion of a primordially given, self-identical meaning of a text and recognize
that utterance (text) and interpretation are not two sides of a divisible laborof
production and reception but rather that already the signs that are interwoven
in the utterance (or in the text) exist, i.e., acquire the status of signs, only by vir-
tue of an interpretation. It is not the interpretation that in a given instance misses
the original meaning of the utterance; rather the utterance itself only has meaning
di hyphesin, only presumably. (Precisely this is what Schleiermacher, and
Sartre following him, called the "divinatory act," and sometimes rendered it as
"guessing," sometimes as "conjecturing." "On devine en lisant, on cre," wrote
Proust.
18
Not only on the basis of Derrida, but already on that of Saussure, the model
of a pragmatic-semantic-syntactic code, from which all elements could be
unequivocally derived in methodical and controlled steps, proves untenable.
LECTURE 27 443
Todorov was one of the first, at the beginning of the 1970s, to question the sys-
tematic masterability of literary texts.
19
Julia Kristeva, the popularizer of Bakh-
tin's and Voloshinov's concept of intertextuality, had shown earlier that the limits
of the individual text are blurred in the infinitely open continuum of all other texts.
She could have referred to Schleiermacher to support this insight, for he declared
interpretation to be an infinite task (HuK, 80-81, 94), and added: "No text can
be completely understood except in connection with the entire range of ideas out
of which it arose, and by means of the knowledge of all life relations both of the
authors as well as of those for whom they write."
20
This obviously is an infinite
task. Schleiermacher complicated it even further by denying that language
(viewed as a system) has the character of finitude (i.e., of self-closure). "Lan-
guage," he noted laconically, "is something infinite because every element is de-
terminable in a particular way by the others" (HuK, 80). This sounds at first like
an elliptically formulated allusion to the differential character of the "totality of
language" (HuK, 78). To be sure, if "differential" were here to be conceived in
the sense of the structuralist "opposition" as a designation for a finite system of
terms that are formed by way of an infinite number of oppositions then one
could scarcely comprehend how the infinitude of language is supposed to be ex-
plained by precisely this proof ("because"). We have to read more carefully:
Schleiermacher does not say that every element is determinable in a determined
way, but rather in a "particular" way ("determinable," not simply "determined").
This apparently means that the mode of determination is open and always particu-
lar, and thus different in every case. Schleiermacher also gives a less elliptical
proof for his thesis of the infinitude of language: "because it is something in-
finitely past and infinitely future that we want to see in the moment of speech"
(HuK, 99). This apparently meansand this is the direction indicated by the ex-
planations Schleiermacher devotes to the second canon of grammatical interpre-
tation (HuK, 116) that if "the meaning of each word in a given passage (has to
be determined) according to its connections with those that surround it," then the
"totality of all [meaning-differentiating] exclusions," which "determined" the term
in past "uses" and will "determine" it in the future, would have to be known. This
reference to time cannot be left out "because language [first] comes into being
through speech" (HuK, 78), and thus in the unidimensional extension of time in
which alone signs can be differentiated from each other. The differentiation of a
certain value for a term x (in the flow of speech) is accomplished by the formation
of open sequences of oppositions; the openness of these sequences makes it struc-
turally impossible to obtain a closed and closable concept of the "system of
language."
Derrida coins the expression "text in general" (P, 44, 59) following a line of
very similar thoughts, although with reference to Hjelmslev's notion of the "in-
finite text," which, however, is meant in an entirely different way in order to
draw text-theoretical consequences from the irreducible nonsimultaneity of the
444 D LECTURE 27
signifying substance of a text. He would agree with Saussure and the aforemen-
tioned theoreticians, even with Schleiermacher, that the attribution of meaning
is a definitively "undecidable" exercise.
"Undecidability" {indcidabilii) is actually a key concept in his thought. It not
only means that a term, repeated at different times, cannot guarantee the identity
of its signifying, but also that it at no time is semantically identifiable.
This last statement however, can be interpreted in different ways, as we have
seen. First, it can mean that there is no signification of a term at all, since it lacks
even the minimal precondition that would allow it to be characterized semanti-
cally (and even if only preliminarily and presumably); this conclusion is absurd,
and it is refuted by our communicative experience. It nevertheless seems to me
that Derrida has difficulty avoiding this conclusion. Another possible inter-
pretation-that of Schleiermacher and Saussure-says that the attribution of
meaning is an infinite exercise because the chain of oppositions, which have to
be kept apart from a term (or an utterance) in order to guarantee its identity, is
indeterminable for structural and individual reasons. For structural reasons, be-
cause no objectively effective law can prescribe how meaning "in the final analy-
sis'* can be articulated; for individual reasons, because, depending on the life ex-
perience, perspective, worldview, and linguistic competence of different
speakers, differentiations of terms can be accomplished whose meaning would
only be able to be controlled from a standpoint removed from communication.
It is not only the case that there factually is no such standpoint; to demand such
a standpoint would be self-contradictory, for words can have a meaning only in
a communicative situation (and not outside it).
However, it does not follow from this relativizing of the conditions under
which we can "make sense" that words or utterances have no meaning. What does
follow from this is merely that meaning is not objectively (i.e., extracommunica-
tively) decidable. In other words, meaning has to prove itself over and over again
in social praxis (and without a final judicial authority to which it might appeal).
"To interpret" means nothing other than this. Something whose objective meaning
(if there were such a meaning independent of communication) were known would
not have to be interpreted. Only the fact that we can never entirely understand
each other (i.e., objectify, "know," "recognize" each other) makes it possible that
we understand each other. All understanding essentially (and not for reasons that
one could reproachfully attribute to the fault or insufficiency of one's interlocutor)
implies nonunderstanding. The "complete" understanding of a statement would
imply its self-annihilation. This is how Whitehead has taught us to see it: over
the course of a process of understanding that would leave nothing in the dark,
each individual aspect of what is to be understood, as soon as it was touched on,
would have to be part of "what is already clear." "It would thus only be a matter
of repeating what is (already) known."
21
Only tautology would guarantee total re-
prieve from the effort of understanding, which always has an innovative aspect
LECTURE 27 445
that transgresses our knowledge. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Schleiermacher had
already held a comparable view. The former wrote: "Only in the individual does
language attain its final distinctness. Nobody conceives in a given word exactly
what his neighbor does, and the ever so slight variation skitters through the entire
language like concentric ripples over the water. All understanding is simultane-
ously a noncomprehension, all agreement in ideas and emotions is at the same
time a divergence."
22
And Schleiermacher underlines in his speeches for the
academy in Berlin, Ueber den Begriff der Hermeneutik, that a consequence of the
infinitude of interpretation is that "noncomprehension will never entirely be dis-
solved" (HuK, 328).
If understanding is essentially defective (and thus has to deal with undecida-
bles), it still does not follow from this that in the totality of communication no
meaning can be determined; nor does it follow from this that interpretations
because they remain without a final criterion are arbitrary or cannot be assimi-
lated (nicht nachvollziehbar). Interpretive hypotheses are always motivated or
can be motivated, and if this were not the case they neither could claim validity
nor could they prevail in communication (as they do from day to day). If the task
of understanding, as Schleiermacher says, is not "mechanizable," then like any
other reasonable hypothesis within the field of the so-called exact sciences, it
must, on the one hand, be provable, and on the other, it must account for the facts.
The interpreter will always make an effort to assimilate (mitvollziehen) the in-
novative act and make evident by which act according to his divination (HuK,
169-70)-the text or the expression in the text (or in the conversation), or even
only a certain individual word use in the expression, contrasts itself with a "state
of language" by virtue of that "continual activity through which language decom-
poses the units that are given to it" (EC, I, 376). In the case of mere "talk about
the weather" (HuK, 83), divination can perhaps be dispensed with (although psy-
choanalysis is of a different opinion: we only need to think about the dispute about
Nietzsche's umbrella). But you will agree with me that an analysis, especially of
literary texts-if it is not supposed to totally bore us or degenerate into a rou-
tinewill have to direct our attention especially to those critical points at which
an innovative view of the world demands a creative assimilation on our part: with-
out this, the new aspectthe change would always be without a name or would
disappear under the name of the old. Interpretation takes this new aspect seriously
because it is what is proper to the individual; it meiotically accompanies its birth;
it is essentially anticonservative. And it knows itself to be in solidarity with one
of the profoundest impulses of Critical Theory, which is also a hermeneutics:
with the salvation of the nonidentical, of that which deviates from the universal,
in short: the salvation of the individual.
The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are
those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest.
446 D LECTURE 27
They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity things
which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insigni-
ficant, and which Hegel labeled "lazy Existenz." Philosophy's theme
would consist of the qualities it downgrades as contingent, as a quantit
ngligeable. A matter of urgency to the concept would be what it fails
to cover, what its abstractionist mechanism eliminates, what is not al-
ready a case of the concept.
23
Already Minima Moralia was an appeal to regard for "individual existence"
(deeply moved by Auschwitz in particular, and by the leveling tendency of
commodity-producing society in general), which, to be sure, can no longer be
defended "immediately" and naively under the conditions of "damaged life," as
it was in the Storm and Stress period, without entering into collusion with these
false salvations of individuality. To be silent about individuality would simultane-
ously have meant common cause with those powers that are responsible for its
death.
The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his own in-
sight, constantly accords the individual, derives paradoxically enough
from his necessary entanglement in liberalistic thinking. The conception
of a totality harmonious through all its antagonisms compels him to as-
sign to individuation, however much he may designate it a driving mo-
ment in the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole.
The knowledge that in pre-history the objective tendency asserts itself
over the heads of human beings, indeed by virtue of annihilating in-
dividual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and particular-
constructed in thought-ever yet being accomplished in history, is dis-
torted in Hegel: with serene indifference he opts once again for liquida-
tion of the particular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole
doubted. The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation
to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more
eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself to
the triumphal car of objective tendencies. The culmination of the social
principle of individuation in the triumph of fatality gives philosophy oc-
casion enough to do so. . . . In the period of his decay, the in-
dividual's experience of himself and what he encounters contributes
once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he
continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant cate-
gory. In the face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of
difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social
force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual
sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a bad con-
science.
24
LECTURE 27 447
The same is true for hermeneutics, which seeks to save in the name of the in-
dividual whatever is nonconforming, whatever is nonidentical, and whatever, be-
cause it is different, is choked and maimed by the executants of power. This pur-
pose inscribes hermeneutics with an ethics that obliges it to rescue the
nonuniversal: hermeneutics works not for the leveling reduction of meaning but
rather for its differentiation and multiplication; it does not seek to eradicate the
singular and subjective (modern industrial society can do this much better), rather
it strives for its retention in the memory of humanity. (Above all we need an ar-
chaeology of individuality.)
25
No doubt there are hermeneutical schools that want to understand interpreta-
tion inversely as the overcoming of this nonidentity as an approximation of the
"ideal objectivity of meaning." These schools might even comprise the majority
of those that have arisen in the short history of hermeneutics. But they do not bear
the original impulse, the "germinal thought" of romantic hermeneutics. Interpre-
tation does not entail, either for Schleiermacher, for Saussure, or for Sartre (to
mention only these three, a minority whose work holds great significance for the
future), an identifying of the original meaning of a word or the meaning intended
by the author. If this were identifiable, then what sense would there be in declar-
ing hermeneutics to be an "infinite task" and the divinatory formation of hypothe-
ses to be insuperable? The concord in the descriptive realm (in the attestation to
the phenomenon of semantic nonidentity) between Derrida, on the one hand, and
Schleiermacher and his authentic successors on the other, does not, to be sure,
extend into the premises of those theories on the basis of which this description
is developed in each case. But philosophy is not only, or at least not essentially,
concerned with the correctness of derivations. Rather, the struggle is one that has
to do with the foundation of the premises themselves. In this respect Derrida re-
mains an opponent even of that variety of hermeneutics that appeals to Schleier-
macher, and in whose tradition recent linguistic research even places the work
of Saussure. How must this conflict be theoretically decided? In favor of diffr-
ancel Or in favor of "interpretation"?
Everything that I have said so far indicates in which direction I tend. A more
detailed justification of my position would have to be the subject matter of a lec-
ture series other than one whose task it is to inquire into the character of neostruc-
turalism. In Das individuelle Allgemeine I hope to have presented reasons why
I advise both hermeneutics as well as (neo)structuralism to reconsider the original
approach of Friedrich Schleiermacher. I say "original" because the reception of
Schleiermacher's hermeneutics reduced it to its psychological aspects, although
he, as we know today, derived his germinal idea namely, the thesis of the "in-
finity of language" and of the incalculability of the effects of meaning more from
the discovery of a structural deficiency inherent to "grammatical interpretation."
Perhaps one should not even say that effective history has systematically misun-
derstood Schleiermacher. For after all, what would be the measuring stick for the
448 LECTURE 27
reconstruction of a text in its "originality" now that we have expressed all these
questions about the scientistic obsession of modern philosophy of language? Lefs
say instead that the cultural and historical a priori of the second half of the nine-
teenth century and the first half of the twentieth century did not allow for the dis-
covery of certain traits in Schleiermacher's hermeneutics that we can bring into
focus today. And we owe our ability to do this not so much to hermeneutical
thinking itself, as to a theoretical impulse from abroad. Left on its own, I fear
that hermeneutics would not have come to the point in the seventies of discovering
its basic problem as that of "semantic undecidability." In the light of Derrida's
pointed questions which were meant to shake hermeneutics down to its
foundationsit learned to see the insufficiencies of hermeneutical reflection bet-
ter than its own tradition would otherwise have made possible. As a result of this
self-questioning, precursors and contemporaries, who previously would not have
been immediately counted as hermeneutical thinkers, came to light: I am think-
ing, for example, of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Charles Sanders Peirce, the criti-
cally edited Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jean-Paul Sartre. And we want to con-
cede one more thing in conclusion: even if the overstating of his radicalism shakes
the plausibility of Derrida's arguments and makes it difficult, indeed impossible,
for us to follow him to his final conclusion, he still defined the field, and to a cer-
tain degree also the level, on which hermeneutics must take up the dialogue with
him.
I hope to have presented strong arguments in Das individuelle Allgemeine to
support the assertion that, in the final analysis, hermeneutics can stand up to the
objections of neostructuralism. Hermeneutics can explain the descriptive realms
of those states of affairs ascertained by neostructuralism just as well on the basis
of its own premises as the latter can, and it avoids a series of aporias that neostruc-
turalism cannot resolve with its own means. If that is reason enough, according
to the traditional view, to favor one theory over another, then preference for the
hermeneutical orientation would be justified. But that does not mean staying with
hermeneutics telle quelle and not learning anything new. Hermeneutics should
not, and could not, remain as it was when we first perceived neostructuralism's
misgivings. Yet the persuasiveness of every theory grows according to its capac-
ity to integrate the arguments of its opponents where they are irrefutable, indeed
to appropriate them and to be able to justify them, on the basis of a revised self-
understanding, better than the opponents themselves could. One meaning of di-
alectics implies precisely this: the resistance that comes from without has to be
made into a resistance within, and it is in the resolution of this conflict that the
theory upholds its claim to truth. That is not parole vide but, on the contrary, the
acknowledgment of the voice of the Other to the extent that I make it into my own
(not reduce it to my own, but make room for it inside myself as that which it is).
The methodological pluralism that accepts neostructuralism, analytical philoso-
phy, and hermeneutics as equally plausible articulations of contemporary thought
LECTURE 27 449
practices the "eunuchlike neutrality" that Droysen ridiculed. In the final analysis,
in subscribing to such an attitude one merely takes up a position of resignation
and intellectual abdication. The work of conceptualization demands more from
those who claim to engage in it than that they execute their own thoughts well;
it also demands that one confront the thoughts of others in transindividual and,
what is more, transcultural and transnational communication. This seems to me
to be one thought that we can take over from classical metaphysics, namely, that
philosophy in postmetaphysical times satisfies claims to universality, which
earlier epochs believed they could ground by appealing to a transtemporal Rea-
son, by means of a will to universal nonrestrictive communication. If West Ger-
man hermeneutics (particularly that of the younger Frankfurt School) has for the
most part failed to make good on the ethics of this imperative, to be sure not in
the case of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, but certainly in that of contemporary French
philosophy, then this does not mean that neostructuralism should, conversely, ne-
glect hermeneutics.
With this introductory lecture series I hope to have demonstrated readiness on
the side of hermeneutics to begin the dialogue with neostructuralism. One can
only hope that this will more and more become one that is carried on reciprocally,
and that the number of participants in the discussion will grow on all sides. Let
me, in conclusion, address to you the request that you take up my appeal to what-
ever extent possible, always keeping in mind Sartre's caveat that opting for the
noncommunicable means opting for the end of communication; and this is the
source of all violence.
26
Notes
Foreword
1. Frank is a philosopher and German literary scholar whose main areas of interest are German
idealism, particularly Schelling, the hermeneutic tradition of the nineteenth century, particularly
Schleiermacher (see Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprach-
philosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, herausgegeben und eingeleitet von M. Frank [Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 19771, and Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und -interpretation
nach Schleiemiacher [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 19771), German romanticism {Das Problem 'Zeit'in der
deutschen Romantik [Munich: Winkler, 19721), and contemporary French theory {Das Sagbare und
das Unsagbare: Studien zur neuesten franzsischen Hermeneutik und Texttheorie [Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1980], in addition to What Is Neostructuralism?). He has written on topics as diverse as the
theory of text and interpretation {Das individuelle Allgemeine, and Frank, "Textauslegung," in D.
Harth and B. Gcbhardt, Erkenntnis der Literatur [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982]), mythology {Der kom-
mende Gott: Vorlesungen iiber die neue Mythologie [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982]), and individuality
{Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualitt [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986]).
2. The term "antirationalism" is meant to sum up the problematic unity of the French movement.
"Antirationalism" describes its common, though by no means united, front against one form of ration-
alism or other. Whether the theories are also "irrational," a derogatory term denouncing the absence
of rationality from a "body" of thought, is an open question that should not be prejudged by the label
of a movement. Rationalists typically think they are exploring a field that possesses or admits of con-
ceptual order and present their theories discursively, perhaps systematically, whereas antirationalists
treat those orders as nonexistent or try to invalidate them.
3. "Basic reality" is here used with a minimum of metaphysical implications. It should not be un-
derstood as implying that "reality" exists independently from the discourse in which it is presented,
nor that its being basic is the ground or the foundation of other kinds of reality. "Reality" is meant
as a topical, not as a metaphysical, term. It designates types of topics or fields authors deal with or
present.
453
454 3 NOTES TO PAGES xix-xxvii
4. Tugendhat is one of the rare philosophers to have published extensively on the philosophical
tradition (57 Kata Tinos: Eine Vntersuchung zu Struktur und Vrsprung aristotelischer Grundbegriffe
[Freiburg: Alber, 19581), contemporary Continental philosophy (Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl
und Heidegger [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970], and analytic philosophy (Traditional and Analytic Philoso-
phy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19821 and
Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 19861). Tugendhat's
conception of rationality is developed in and evolves through Traditional and Analytic Philosophy
(theoretical reason), and Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (subjectivity), to Problme der
Ethik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984) (ethics).
5. Derrida's initial remarks are found in "Signature, Event, Context," reprinted in Derrida, Mar-
gins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Searle attacks in "Reiterating the
Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp.
198-208. Derrida replies in "Limited Inc abc . . .;" Glyph 1. Compare also Frank, "Zur Entropie
der Sprache," in Frank, Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare, and Lecture 25 in this book. Many compari-
sons of analytic philosophy and antirationalism, for instance, by Richard Rorty ("Philosophy as a Kind
of Writing: An Essay on Derrida," in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982), or Henry Staten (Wittgenstein and Derrida [Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1984]), are either presentational or stress similarities. The philosophical interest lies
in critical confrontation, exhibited, for example, by the French analytic philosopher Jacques Bou-
veresse. He offers provocative discussions of antirationalism in Le Philosophe chez les autophages
(Paris: Minuit, 1984) and Rationalit et cynisme (Paris: Minuit, 1984).
6. J.-F. Lyotard has triggered the controversy through remarks in The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Habermas attacks antira-
tionalism broadly in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987). Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernism," in Praxis International A (1984), pp.
32-44 summarizes the initial controversy. Another topic of the debate has been Foucauit's theory of
power. See in particular Axel Honneth, Kritik der Macht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), and
Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, chapters 9 and 10. To my knowledge this is the most extended
debate between a contemporary rationalism-the Frankfurt School-and contemporary antira-
tionalism.
7. T. W. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum,
1982). The full title of the German edition from 1944 is Dialektik der Aujkldrung: Philosophische
Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1944).
8. J. Habermas, Thorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981,
1985). One of the two volumes has appeared in translation: The Theory of Communicative Action,
vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
9. Niklas Luhmann is a sociologist and a social philosopher. In Luhmann, Soziale Systme:
Grundriss einer allgemeinen Thorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), he gives a general account of his
theory. The translations united in Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), offer a good introduction to his ideas. Several more specialized works arc
available in translation, among them Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
10. Of course, Heidegger's attitude toward hermeneutics has changed in his later writings.
1. My summary is based upon Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975). J.
C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1985), gives a very helpful presentation of Gadamer's hermeneutics.
12. This is the point where Gadamer clearly sketches a concept of reason. For an exposition of
his policy of interpretation, see also his contribution to the debate between French and German philos-
ophers documented in Ph. Forget (d.), Text und Interpretation (Munich: Fink, 1984). I will refer
to the debate later. See also notes 25, 29, and 30.
NOTES TO PAGES xxix-xli 455
13. It is difficult to choose a sample from Ricoeur's abundant writings. I have found Freud and
Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970) and The
Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) to be the most valuable expositions
of his hermeneutics. The reader may also want to consult Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse
and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), and Ricoeur, Es-
sais d'hermneutique (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
14. See note 1. The two books most relevant for the present context are Frank, Das individuelle
Allgemeine and Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualit .
15. Das individuelle Allgemeine., see the chapter "The Unity of Meaning and the Schematism of
Language," pp. 185ff.
16. J.-P. Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Two volumes have ap-
peared in English translation: The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981, 1987). Frank has used Sartre's theory in Das individuelle Allgemeine in the
chapter on the conflict between structuralism and interpretation, pp. 247rT. He also gives a general
presentation of The Family Idiot in "Archologie des Individuums: Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres
Flaubert," printed in Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. See also Lecture 23 in this book.
17. Particularly emphasized in "Archologie des Individuums. Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres
Flaubert"
18. For some differences between Deleuze and Derrida see Lectures 23-25; Lyotard and Fou-
cault: Lecture 9; Foucault and Derrida: Lecture 9.
19. Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualit: See also Frank's previous thought on this topic in
Das individuelle Allgemeine, pp. 87-121, and the summary in Lecture 23 of this book. Frank's ideas
on individuality are indebted to Sartre and to Henrich.
20. Dieter Henrich is perhaps best known as an interpreter of Kant (Henrich, Identitat und Objek-
tivitt: Eine Untersuchung iiber Kants transzendentale Deduktion [Heidelberg: Winter, 1978]) and
Hegel (Henrich, Hegel im Kontext [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971]). For his ideas on subjectivity see
Fichtes ursprungliche Einsicht (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), Selbstverhaltnisse (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1981), Fluchtlinien: Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982).
21. See Henrich, Fichtes ursprungliche Einsicht.
22. Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualit, pp. 15, 16. See also Lecture 23 in this
book. Further elucidation is implicitly given in the passages on Lacan in Lectures 18 and 19.
23. Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualitat, p. 120. See also Das individuelle Allgemeine.
24. My critical remarks are directed against hermeneutics only in its present state and as a theory
of rationality. They are not meant to discredit the theory of interpretation or the philosophical anthro-
pology (symbolic man) it puts forward.
25. On the Continental scene, J. Greisch, Hermneutique et grammatologie (Paris: Editions du
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1977), and Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine, are early
examples. I mentioned in note 12 that a debate between French and German philosophers about her-
meneutics is documented in Forget, Text und Interpretation. The volume contains contributions by
Gadamer and Derrida. J.-L. Nancy, Le Partage des voix (Paris: Galile, 1982), summarizes decon-
structionist views on hermeneutics.
26. Frank has written extensively on the problem throughout his publications. In what follows
I draw on his ideas, also as they are expressed in Das individuelle Allgemeine and the Appendix to
Was ist Neostrukturalismus? not contained in the present translation.
27. Derrida, for instance, in his "Purveyor of Truth," reprinted in Derrida, The Postcard: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 413-96 has relied
on the second strategy to discredit Lacan's interpretation of Poe's The Purloined Letter.
28. See Lectures 5, 26, and 27 in this book and the untranslated appendix to Was ist Neostruk-
turalismus?
29. Gadamer, "Text und Interpretation," in Forget, Text und Interpretation, p. 24.
456 D NOTES TO PAGES xlii-23
30. Derrida, "Guter Wille zur Macht I und II," in Forget, Text und Interpretation, p. 56.
31. It seems to me that this situation has often prevailed, for instance, in Derrida's debate with
Husserl and Saussure, but also in Habermas's discussion of antirationalism. The pattern of the prob-
lem is this: A gives an argument to refute B. The conclusion of A's argument attacks B\s position.
But A
1
s argument against B is based on premises P, not shared by B. Neither of the participants argues
for his or against the opponent's premises. Often they are not even mentioned.
32. Antirationalism since Nietzsche has rejected this distinction. It still seems useful to me.
Lecture 1
1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 15 (1957), p. 72; henceforth cited as
CFS.
2. TN: The phrase "spiritual situation of the age" refers to Karl Jaspers Die geistige Situation der
Zeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1931); Jiirgen Habermas alludes to this title in the collection of essays he
edited, Stichworte zur geistigen Situation der Zeit, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), selected es-
says of which have appeared under the title Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age, trans.
Andrew Buckwalter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984).
3. Pierre Leroux, "Du Cours de Philosophie de Schelling: Aperu de la situation de la Philosophie
en Allemagne," La Revue indpendante, 3 (1842), p. 348.
4. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), pp.
12-13.
5. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols. (New York: Mac-
millan, 1929), II, p. 15; henceforth cited as Logic.
6. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 1978), p. 232.
7. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy,
trans. Thomas Common (New York: Macmillan, 1910), X, pp. 167-68. Further references to this
edition will be cited as Nietzsche, Works, with volume and page number.
8. Nietzsche, Werke in drei Banden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1966), HI, p. 424. Fur-
ther references to this edition will be cited as Nietzsche, Werke, with volume and page number.
9. GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Theorie-Werkausgabe, ed. Karl. M. Michel and Eva Molden-
hauer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968ff.), II, p. 432.
10. Cited by Hegel, Theorie-Werkausgabe, II, p. 432.
11. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); henceforth
cited as PC.
Lecture 2
1. Hermann Rauschning, Die Revolution des Nihilismus (Zurich: Europa Verlag, 1938); a second
edition was brought out by Golo Mann in 1964; TN: Rauschning's book appeared in English under
the title The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Alliance, 1939).
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, Edition critique, ed. Rudolf Engler,
2. vois., (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967-74); henceforth cited as EC with reference to volume and
page number.
3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, published by Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger: Edition critique prepared by Tullio de Mauro,
2nd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1980), pp. 24, 43, 106fL, 115, 157, 182, passim. English translations in text
are taken from Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966),
NOTES TO PAGES 24-40 457
e.g., pp. 9, 73; henceforth cited as CGL. [The translation uses the term "system," not the phrase "a
language system."]
4. Cf. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Pion, 1958), p. 254; published in
English as Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brook Grundfest Schoepf (New York:
Doubleday, 1967); henceforth cited as SA.
5. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Saillie, 2 vols. (London: Swan Sonnenschein.
1910), pp. I24ff.; see esp. p. 143: "The supersensible world is in this way a quiescent 'kingdom of
laws,* no doubt beyond the world of perception for this exhibits the law only through incessant
change but likewise present in it, and its direct immovable copy or image."
6. Richard Bruiting has demonstrated this through the example of the displacement in meaning
of the term texte, Texte" und "criture" in der franzsischen Literaturwissenschaft nach dent Struk-
turalismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976).
7. Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 82. Quotations in the text are taken from Positions,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); henceforth cited as P.
8. I will henceforth quote from the vulgate version of this compilation of lectures using the ab-
breviation Cours, as well as from Tullio de Mauro's "Edition critique," 2nd ed. (Paris: Payot, 1980).
Except for de Mauro's introduction and his superb comments, this edition is a reprint of Bally, Seche-
haye, and Riedlinger's edition of 1915. [TN: English translations in text are taken from Course in
General Linguistics (CGL).]
9. Derrida, "Limited Inc abc . . . ," supplement to Glyph 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1977), pp. 162-254; henceforth cited as U.
10. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 378. Published in English as Mar-
gins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); henceforth cited
as Margins. See also LI, p. 24.
11. In general the authors of so-called structuralism have concerned themselves astonishingly little
with the situation of the manuscripts of the Cours. Lvi-Strauss becomes aware of it in 1960 and
replaces Saussure's name with the phrase "the editors of the Course in General Linguistics" ("the re-
cent documents of which show how the editors of the Cours were able to force and schematize the
thought of their master"); Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Pion, 1973), p. 26. On the present
situation of the manuscript of the Cours see Ren Amacker, Linguistique saussurienne (Geneva:
Droz, 1975), and also Ludwig Jger, "F. de Saussures historisch-hermeneutische Idee der Sprache:
Ein Pladoyer fur die Rekonstruktion des Saussureschen Denkens in seiner authentischen Gestalt,"
Linguistik und Didaktik, 27 (1976), pp. 210-44.
12. L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques (Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog og Kulturforlag, 1959), p.
21.
13. Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaniak Mischler (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p.
14.
Lecture 3
1. "Linguistics occupies a special place among the social sciences, to whose ranks it unquestiona-
bly belongs" (SA, 29).
2. See Troubetzkoy, "La Phonologie actuelle," Psychologie du langage (Paris, 1933), p. 243, to
which Lvi-Strauss refers in the following quotation.
3. Immanuel Kant s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Humanities
Press, 1950), A 140, B 179-80, p. 182.
4. Lvi-Strauss, TV Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), p. 130.
5. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper
& Row, 1962), p. 121; henceforth cited as BT.
6. Lvi-Strauss, Mythologiques (Paris: Pion, 1964), 4 vols.
458 LI NOTES TO PAGES 41-64
7. Benveniste, Problmes de linguistique gnrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 122rT.
8. Barthes, "Introduction l'analyse structurale des rcits," Communications, 8 (1966), pp. 1-27.
9. Ibid., p. 3; emphasis added.
10. See also Derrida, "Semiology and Grammatology," P, p. 15.
11. The term "autochthony" denotes a Being-outside-itself of the human being, a Being-an-
outgrowth of the earth principle (or of Mother Earth). The limping gait reminds the human being of
this "vestige of earth, painful to bear"; that is, it reminds the human being that he/she belongs to living
creatures, i.e., is himself/herself admitted into the economy of nature. He/she is an "unhappy animal."
Lecture 4
1. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, vol. 1 of Introduction to a Science of Mythol-
ogy, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 5; henceforth cited
as SM I.
2. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Samtliche Schriften, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and
Augsburg: Cotta, 1856-61), part II, vol. 2, pp. 625fT; henceforth cited as SW (e.g., SW H/2, pp.
625ff.).
3. Ricoeur, "Symbole et temporalit," Archivio difilosofia, III (1963), p. 24; see also pp. 9-10.
4. Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), p. 278; henceforth cited as WD.
5. The Naked Man, vol. 4 of Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen
Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 625; henceforth cited as SM 4.
6. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une Archologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard,
1966); published in English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Random House [Vintage Books], 1970), p. 387. Henceforth cited as OT. Where necessary,
the French text is cited (MQ.
7. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p.
184; hencefort cited as HuK.
8. Geimas, Smantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966), p. 53.
9. Fichte, Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Hans Jacob (Berlin: Junker and Diinnhaupt, 1937), II,
p. 368.
10. Ibid.
11. See Fichte, Samtliche Werke, ed. i. H. Fichte (Berlin: Veit, 1845-46), I, p. 522: "You can
undoubtedly think thinking: I; and while you are thinking this you innerly find your consciousness
to be determined in a certain way ; you only think something, precisely that which you grasp with that
concept of I, and you are conscious of doing this; and you do not think something else which otherwise
you could very well think and probably even have thought." This edition is henceforth cited as FW,
with volume and page numbers.
12. Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 5. The passage con-
tinues as follows: "Let us first posit the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any con-
straint of representation (of imitation). In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without
any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of significrs, not a structure of
signifieds."
13. Lvi-Strauss, "Introduction l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et an-
thropologie (Paris: PUF, 1966), pp. ix-lii, here p. 1.
14. Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 153-54;
henceforth cited as E. Where necessary, the French text is cited: crits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), here re-
ferred to as E (Fr. ed.).
NOTES TO PAGES 65-91 D 459
Lecture 5
1. Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Henceforth referred to as GR.
2. "It is on the basis of the formalist and differential motif present in Saussure's Cours that the
psychologism, phonologism and exclusion of writing that are no less present in it can be criticized"
(P, 36).
3. To avoid overburdening myself at this point I refer the reader to Ludwig Jager's essay
"Linearitt und Zeichensynthesis: Saussures Entfaltung des semiologischen Form-Substanz-Problems
in der Tradition Hegels und Humboldts," Fugen: Deutsch-Franzsisches Jahrbuch fur Texi-Analyiik
(Olten: Walter, 1980), pp. 187-205; see also his "Zeichen und Verstehen: Der Saussuresche Begriff
des Aposmes als Grundlagenbegriffeiner hermeneutischen Smiologie" (unpublished manuscript).
4. John R. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph, 2 (1977), p. 207.
5. "The case of the concept of structure, that you also bring up, is certainly more ambiguous.
Everything depends upon how one sets it to work" (P, 24).
6. Samuel Weber, "Closure and Exclusion," Diacritics, 10 (1980), pp. 35-46, see esp. 37-39.
7. Hegel, Theorie~Werkausga.be, IX, p. 48.
8. Luhmann, Legitimation durch Vetfahren (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1969).
9. I developed this idea in a more argumentative fashion in my paper "Deux sicles de critique
de la rationalit: Le Dfi de la philosophie actuelle," Audia philosophica, 42 (1983).
10. "To the extent that science is differential, its pragmatics provides the antimodel of a stable
system. A statement is deemed worth retaining the moment it marks a difference from what is already
known, and after an argument and proof in support of it has been found. Science is a model of an
'open system,' in which a statement becomes relevant if it'generates ideas,'that is, if it generates other
statements and other game rules. Science possesses no general metalanguage in which all other lan-
guages can be transcribed and evaluated. This is what prevents its identification with the system and,
all things considered, with terror. If the division between decision makers and executors exists in the
scientific community (and it does), it is a fact of the socioeconomic system and not of the pragmatics
of science itself. It is in fact one of the major obstacles to the imaginative development of knowledge"
(PC, 64).
Lecture 6
1. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975), p. 269; henceforth cited as TM.
2. Gadamer, "On the Problem of Self-Understanding," Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and
ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 55; compare also the decisive
formulation from the Kleine Schriften (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1967), I, p. 127: "Effective-historical con-
sciousness is in an unsuspendable manner more Being than consciousness."
3. See Fichte, FW, II, p. 19 and XI, p. 18.
4. Fichte, FW, II, p. 62.
5. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J, S. Stewart (Edinburgh:
T. and T. Clark, 1928), p. 8; emphasis added.
6. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 17. [TN: We have altered the translation slightly.]
7. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, Samtliche Werke, ed. L. Jonas (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1839), section
III, part IV/2, pp. 429 (emphasis added) and 430, respectively.
8. We recall that the term "structure" was introduced into philosophy in its specifically modern
meaning by Schleiermacher.
9. Foucault, L'Archologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); published in English as The Ar-
chaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1971), p. 113. Hence-
forth cited as AK. Where necessary the French text is cited (AdS).
460 G NOTES TO PAGES 92-120
10. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970),
p. 25; henceforth cited as RC.
11. Foucault uses the drastic formulation "the already 'encoded' eye"; OT, xxi.
12. Saussure, "Introduction, Cours de linguistique gnrale [1908-9]," CFS, 15 (1957), pp.
1-103, here p. 82.
13. Saussure, CFS, 15 (1957), p. 89. My emphasis, M.F.
14. Lacan, crits; see also p. 304: "the subjection of the subject to the signifier."
15. The French translators characteristically render reluzent as rflectivemenv. "de s'interprter
lui-mme 'rflectivement' partir de ce monde"; L'Etre et le temps, trans. Rudolf Boehm and Alphonse
de Waklhans (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 37.
16. Gerd Lingrn, "Strukturale Linguistik," Grundziige der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschafi,
d. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Volker Sinemus (Munich: dtv, 1974), II, p. 151.
Lecture 7
1. Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 15-16; cf. also the "Fore-
word to the English edition," OT, xiv.
2. Sartre, "Jean Paul Sartre rpond," L'Arc, 30 (1966), p. 87.
3. This is the case despite the fact that one repeatedly comes across formulations that seem to favor
such a ideological interpretation, for example, when he talks about the reason of the West, which
develops in stages ("Western reason is entering the age of judgment"; OT, 61).
4. Jean Piaget was correct in comparing the method of describing succeeding epistemes genealogi-
cally with the theory of paradigm change developed by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Structuralism, trans. Charniak Mischler
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Piaget also compares Foucault's procedure, although negatively,
with the premodern evolutionary-biological model, stating: "His epistemes follow upon, but not from,
one another, whether formally or dialectically. One episteme is not affiliated with another, either ge-
netically or historically. The message of this 'archaeology' of reason is, in short, that reason's self-
transformations have no reason and that its structures appear and disappear by fortuitous mutations
and as a result of momentary upsurges. The history of reason is, in other words, much like the history
of species as biologists conceived of it before cybernetic structuralism came on the scene" (p. 134).
5. "History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that
does not yet exist" (OT, 372).
6. Piaget uncovered this petitio principii in Structuralism.
1. In the following I consciously use the term "Enlightenment," although Foucault spans a much
larger epoch with the phrase ge classique. In reality, however, the guiding concept of representa-
tion, as apt as it might be for the illumination of Enlightenment's particular characteristics, seems
largely inappropriate as a means for conceptually unifying classical French literature from Pascal to
Corneille, not to mention the moralists. Karlheinz Stierle has justifiably objected, in his paper "Die
negative Anthropologie der franzsischen Klassik" (to appear in the documents of the last
Romanistentag), that in Foucault's conception the subject is seen as something unfathomable that
never completely makes itself available to representation.
Lecture 8
1. Johann Martin Chladen, Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernunfftiger Reden und Schriften
(Leipzig: Lanckisch, 1742), section 155.
2. Chladen, sections 308ff.
3. Foucault, "Prface," Arnauld and Lancelot, Grammaire gnrale et raisonne (Paris: Republi-
cations Paulet, 1969), pp. iii-iv.
NOTES TO PAGES 121-139 461
4. Logigue de Port-Royal, I, chapter IV, quoted by Foucault, OT, pp. 63-64.
5. Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme'?, d. Franois Wahl (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 300ff.
6. Novalis, Schriften, ed P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 960ff\), II, p.
110.
7. Hendrik Birus, "Zwischen den Zeiten: Friedrich Schleiermacher als Klassiker der neuzeitlichen
Hcrmeneuk" Hermeneutische Positionen: Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, ed. Hen-
drik Birus (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), p. 28.
8. Birus, "Zwischen den Zeiten," p. 28.
9. Cited by Birus, p. 28.
10. See Fichte, FW, I, pp. 201 and 538.
11. Another formulation that also interprets double representation as relationship with itself is
"duplication of representation in relation to itself (OT, p. 237).
12. This compatibility with the model of self-consciousness that is reflected in itself (for example,
in Sartre) can already be gathered from Foucault's terminology. He speaks of the fact that the self-repre-
sentation of the sign in itself to itself is always "perpendicular" ("la reprsentation est toujours perpen-
diculaire elle-mme"). This corresponds to Sartre's "transversality" of self-consciousness that is non-
thematically inscribed in each consciousness o/something. The horizontal consciousness o/something,
because it thematizes this other, is at the same time perpendicularly crossed by an implicit familiarity
with this act of thematizing itself: "conscience non-positionelle (de) soi de quelque chose d'autre."
13. What became problematical was thus "the relation of representation to that which is posited
in it. . . . Representation has lost the power to provide a foundation-with its own being, . . . for
the links that can join its various elements together" (OT, 238-39).
14. Herder, Samtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877fl\), XVIII, p. 485.
15. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense," Works, II, pp. 171-92.
16. Nietzsche, Works^ II, p. 180.
17. "The analytic disciplines are found to be epistemologically distinct from those that are bound
to make use of synthesis. . . . The ground-plan of that profound event . . . detached the possibil-
ity of synthesis from the space of representation" (OT, 246).
Lecture 9
1. "What Classical thought reveals is the power of discourse. In other words, language in so far
as it represents- language that names, patterns, combines, and connects and disconnects things as it
makes them visible in the transparency of words" (OT, 310-11).
2. Birus, "Zwischen den Zeiten," p. 28 (see note 7, Lecture 8).
3. Birus, "Zwischen den Zeiten," p. 29.
4. Birus, "Zwischen den Zeiten," p. 49. Cf. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World View,"
Boundary 2, 4 (1976), p. 352.
5. I supplied further evidence for this thesis in "Ein Grundelement der historischen Analyse: Die
Diskontinuitat: Die Epochenwende von 1775 in Foucaults 'Archologie,' " Poetik und Hermeneutik
XII: Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewusstsein, ed. R. Herzog and R. Koselleck (Munich:
Fink/Schningh, 1984).
6. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Avel-
ing, ed. Friedrich Engels (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), I, p. 186: cf. Grundrisse: Foundations
of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicoiaus (London: Allen Lane, 1973): "the
general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity" (p. 296).
7. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 146.
8. "Life withdraws into the enigma of a force inaccessible in its essence, apprehendable only in
the efforts it makes here and there to manifest and maintain itself (OT, 273).
9. "Bopp's analyses were to be of major importance . . . in defining what language may be in
462 NOTES TO PAGES 139-184
its essence. It is no longer a system of representations which has the power to pattern and recompose
other representations; it designates in its roots the most constant of actions, states, and
wishes; . . . Language is'rooted'not in the things perceived, but in the active subject. And perhaps,
in that case, it is a product of will and energy, rather than of the memory that duplicates representa-
tion. We speak because we act, and not because recognition is a means of cognition. Like action, lan-
guage expresses a profound will to something. . . . Language is no longer linked to the knowing
of things, but to men's freedom" (OT, 289, 290, 291).
Lecture 10
1. Cf. the title of a chapter in the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J Payne (Indian Hills, Colo.: Falcon's Wing Press, 1958), II, pp. 20Iff.: "On the Primacy of
the Will in Self-consciousness."
2. Cf. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe seiner Schriften, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich, Pader-
born, Vienna: Schningh, I958ff.), XVIII, p. 101.
Lecture 11
1. Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, "Michel Foucaults strukturale Thorie der Geschichte," Philosophisches
Jahrbuch, 79 (1972), pp. 172-75; Gerhard Plumpe and Clemens Kammler, "Wissen ist Macht: ber
die theoretische Arbeit Michel Foucaults," Philosophische Rundschau, 27 (1980), pp. 185-218, esp.
200ff.; in particular see the excellent essay by Hinrich Fink-Eitel, "Michel Foucaults Analytik der
Macht," Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststruk-
turalismus, d. Friedrich A. Kittler (Paderborn: Schningh, 1980), pp. 38-78.
2. See, for example, the preface to his Phenomenology of Min d, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1910), I, p. 47; or the chapter entitled "The Idea" in his Logic, II, pp. 395-486.
3. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, I, p. 21.
4. Cf. the more extensive argumentation in my book Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings
Hegelkritik und die Anfange der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 75ff. and
207fT.
5. TN: See H. A. Korflf, Der Geist der Goethezeit: Versuch einer ideellen Entwicklung der
klassisch-romantischen Literaturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1964ff.).
6. Cf. Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 55; henceforth cited as OD.
Except where indicated, page numbers correspond to The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), where
The Order of Discourse is included as an appendix.
7. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970); cf. my analysis of the methodological operation of this text,
"Textauslegung," Erkenntnis der Literatur, ed. Dietrich Harth and Paul Gebhardt (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1983), pp. 123-60, esp. 147ff.
8. Here one finds the well-known statement that "it is permissible to look upon language itself as
the expression of the power of the masters"; see Works, XIII, p. 20.
Lecture 12
1. The future of the (transgressed) system will be a (new, or alternative, but in any case a) system.
Sartre has clearly emphasized this: "Since the evolution of the system is the product of its internal
reactions and its self-regulations, the observer placed inside the system has no other future than that
of the system. And there is not a single element in the system that makes it possible to foresee what
will happen after its disappearance. At most it can be said, after a period of disorder, that another
system will be constituted, with its structures and its pseudointernal laws that will regulate its life and
its death." Jean-Paul Sartre, "Dtermination et libert," Les crits de Sartre: Chronologie, bib-
NOTES TO PAGES 185-199 D 463
liographie commente, ed. Michel Contt and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 735-45;
here p. 743.
2. Nietzsche, Works, XVII, p. 109; cf. also Werke, II, pp. 473, 161, 1059, 1089, 1151; III, pp.
1263, 834, 1181.
3. Cf. also Lacan, E (Fr. d.), 505: One can "imprison" no one in language; "in spite of all the
between-the-lines censures," language still serves at all times "to signify something quite other than
what it says."
4. Even Althusser's idea of the dominance of one structure (the economic structure) over the others
is still too closely related to the idea of a "kernel" or "principle" of structure(s), an idea neostructural-
ism overcame.
5. This semantic indeterminateness is still present in the Old German verb wesen (to be); Schelling
and Heidegger point this out.
6. Dieter Henrich, "Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart: Oberlegungen mit Riicksicht auf
Hegel," Immanente Aesthetik, sthetische Reflexion (Munich: Fink, 1966), p. 18.
7. Henrich, "Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart," pp. 18-19.
8. Sartre coined a famous expression for this experience: "la conscience nat porte sur un tre
qui n'est pas elle," L'Etre et le nant: Essai d'ontologie phnomnologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943),
p. 28; henceforth cited as EN. Cf. also Heidegger, B, p. 330.
9. "Re-presentation" (Vor-stellung), "ob-ject" (Gegen-stand), and "pre-sence" (Gegen-wart) form
semantically one and the same metaphorical frame.
10. See for example Fichte, FW, I. pp. 526-27.
11. Novalis, Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, I960ff.), II,
p. 112.
12. See Novalis, Schriften, II, p. 125. Cf. also the chapter "Nicht-setzendes und setzendes Be-
wusstsein" in my book Das Problem "ZeiC in der deutschen Romantik (Munich: Winkler, 1972), pp.
144ff.
13. Cf. Sinclair, "Philosophische Raisonnements," Isaak von Sinclair zwischen Fichte, Hlderlin
und Hegel, Hannelore Hegel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1971), pp. 243n\, esp. 246, 251ff., 268ff.
14. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1942), p. 288; cf. Di-
alektik, Samtliche Werke, ed. L. Jonas (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1839), p. 429.
15. Frank, Das Problem "Zeif in der deutschen Romantik, pp. 130-232.
16. See also my book Das individuelle Allgemeine\ Textstrukturierung und -interpretation nach
Schleiermacher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 91-114, esp. p. 95.
17. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed, Odebrecht, pp. 290 and 291.
18. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed. Jonas, p. 429.
19. Sartre, La transcendance de go: Esquisse d'une description phnomnologique (Paris: Vrin,
1978).
20. Deleuze, Logigue du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p. 124; henceforth cited as LS.
21. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E.
Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 100-1, 109-10; henceforth cited as BN.
22. Husserl, VOrigine de la gomtrie, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1974); translated into English as
Husserl s Origin of Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey, ed. David B. Allison (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Ni-
colas Hays, 1978); all references follow this edition and are henceforth cited as OG.
23. Sartre, "Conscience de soi et connaisance de soi," Bulletin de la Socit Franaise de
Philosophie, 42 (1948), pp. 49-91; here, p. 64.
Lecture 13
1. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/2, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977), pp. 160ff.
464 NOTES TO PAGES 200-219
2. See also Works, XV, p. 40: "It [consciousness] is only a means of communication: it was devel-
oped by intercourse, and with a view to the interests of intercourse."
3. See Works, VI, p. 62: "That the character is unchangeable is not true in a strict sense; this
favourite theory means, rather, that during the short lifetime of an individual the new influencing mo-
tives cannot penetrate deeply enough to destroy the ingrained marks of many thousands of years."
4. See Works, XV, p. 73: "Thus: the indefiniteness and the chaos of sense-impressions are, as
it were, made logical"
5. "As a matter of fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only holds good of assumed existences
which we have created. Logic is the attempt on our part to understand the actual world according
to a scheme of Being devised by ourselves; or, more exactly, it is our attempt at making the actual
world more calculable and more susceptible to formulation, for our own purposes" (Works, XV, p.
33). Nietzsche, as we know, calls this process "interpretation."
6. Derrida, La dissmination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); page numbers correspond to Dissemination,
trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), henceforth cited as Diss (here
pp. 340, 341).
7. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), I, pp.
200ff.
8. See also my article "Die Aufhebung der Anschauung im Spiel der Metapher," neue hefte fur
philosophie, 18-19 (1980), pp. 58-78.
9. "As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here
concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils
of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of the 'thing in itself and phenom-
enon, for we do not 'know' enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction'" (Works, X, 299-
300).
10. See Schleiermacher, Samtliche Werke, (Berlin: Reimer, 1834ff.), HI/6, p. 518.
11. See Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein undSelbstbestimmung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979),
pp. 96ff. and 110-11.
12. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1953), sections 244ff.; henceforth cited as PL See also R. Rhees, d., "Wittgenstein's
Notes for Lectures on 'Private Experience' and 'Sense Data/ " Philosophical Review, 11 (1968), pp.
271-320.
13. From this it follows but Wittgenstein pays no attention to thisthat all psychic states and
acts have to be conscious; if this consciousness cannot be a knowledge, then it can only be a matter
of a nonpositing consciousness.
Lecture 14
1. Ernst Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1976).
2. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 7.
3. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie, p. 63.
4. See his discussion of this in "Phnomnologie und Sprachanalyse," Hermeneutik und Dialektik:
Festschrift fur H.-G Gadamer, d. R. Bubner et al. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1970), pp. 3-23.
5. Cf. Tugendhat, "Phnomnologie und Sprachanalyse," p. 23: "Once the understanding of
propositions is shown to be primary over against the positing (Meinen) of objects, we are faced with
the question of where it should be located. That a proposition (Satz) is the primary unit of meaning
seems to be grounded in the fact that it is the smallest unit of intersubjective understanding. (One can
understand a name, but nothing can be communicated with it.) This seems to indicate that, while
within the scheme of the subject-object relation this question was approached from the point of the
individual subject, the understanding-one-another (Verstehen) of propositions should from the outset
NOTES TO PAGES 220-244 465
be located in an intersubjective understanding {Verstandigung), and it is for this reason that the 'sub-
ject' proves to be secondary over against intersubjectivity."
6. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einfuhrung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie, p. 103.
7. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, pp. 18-19.
8. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimtnung, p. 19. TN: Unless otherwise indicated,
we have translated Sachverhalt as "state of affairs" rather than as "proposition." We have opted for
this alternative because Sachverhalt does not necessarily refer to a linguistic entity, as the word
"proposition" seems to indicate, and because we would no longer be able to make the distinction be-
tween Sachverhalt and Satz, the latter word consistently being translated as "proposition." Tugend-
hat's suggestion that Sachverhalt is rendered as "proposition" by Anglo-Saxon philosophers is at least
in part fallacious, since in Ogden's translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus the German word is ren-
dered as "atomic fact.
11
9. Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, p. 21.
10. See Derrida, "Signature vnement contexte," Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit,
1972), pp. 365-93.
11. Derrida, La voix et le phnomne: Introduction au problme du signe dans la phnomnologie
de Husserl (Paris: PUF, 1967). Except where cited as VP, page numbers correspond to Speech and
Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, 111.:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), henceforth cited as SP, here p. 8.
12. LVrigine de la gomtrie (Paris: PUF, 1974). Page numbers correspond to Edmund Husserl s
Origin of Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey, ed. David B. Allison (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicholas
Hays, 1978); henceforth cited as OG.
13. Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson
(New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 318-28; henceforth cited as Ideas.
14. It is not inappropriate that Derrida speaks of this alleged preexpressive linguisticality of mean-
ing {Sinn) as an criture blanche. Derrida translates the word Bedeuten ("meaning something"), which
Husserl often uses in an active sense, with vouloir-dire.
15. I am disregarding here the problem (which is also discussed by Derrida) of "incomplete ex-
pression," where "the upper layer need not extend its expressing function over the entire lower layer"
{Ideas, 324), as well as the problem of the essential inadquation between individual meaning and
its circulating (intersubjectively valid) signification.
Lecture 15
1. "By phenomenological epoche I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic life the realm
of my psychological self-experienceto my transcendental-phenomenological Ego, the realm of
transcendental-phenomenological self-experience. The Objective world, the world that exists for me,
that always has and always will exist for me, the only world that ever can exist for me-this world,
with all its Objects, I said, derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from
me myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with
transcendental-phenomenological epoch." Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), p. 26; henceforth cited as CM.
2. "This is the irrepressible philosophical desire to summarize-interiorize-dialecticize-master-
relever the metaphorical division between the origin and itself, the Oriental difference" {Margins,
269).
3. See Klaus Held, lbendige Gegenwart: Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen
Ich bei Edmund Husserl, eniwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966),
pp. 96ff. In my summary of Derrida's critique of Husserl I have intentionally set aside the decisive
466 [J NOTES TO PAGES 245-268
point that self- consciousness can never be described as a relation ^/something to something, and thus
also not as the work of an identification.
Lecture 16
1. Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), p. 33;
henceforth cited as PL. See also CM, pp. 83-88.
2. "Is human transcendental consciousness only the place of reflexive articulation, i.e., the media-
tion of a Logos retaking possession of itself through this consciousness?" (OG, 146).
3. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans.
James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964); henceforth cited as T-C.
4. Something that is absolute is, literally, something that is nonrelative [ein Unheziigliches), and
its logical opposite, relativity, is a being-related or being-referred to an Other (see Schelling, SW,
1/6, p. 190). Applied to temporality, relativity takes the form of what Schelling describes in this man-
ner: "A non-being (Nicht-Wesen) looks for its reality, which it does not have in and of itself, in the
Other; it looks for it in an Other which itself does not have a reality and which, for its part, is also
looking to find it in an Other. This infinite interdependence of things . . . is thus itself only tes-
timony to, and expression of, the futitity to which they are subjected and the striving back to the unity
from which they are torn away and in which only the all {alls) is truth" (SW, 1/6, pp. 195-96; see
also 1/4, p. 397).
5. When Husserl says that what is given to reflection presents itself as if it were "already there"
(T-C, 179), then the prereflective asserts a priorness to reflection that cannot be subsumed under posit-
ing consciousness. On the other hand, the consciousness of reflection itself is "something of which
we are inwardly conscious" (176), and thus it is instantaneous to that prereflective consciousness that
it has of itself as reflection. This temporal interval is very difficult to understand if one simultaneously
insists on the unity of the modes of Being of consciousness: that which produces consciousness within
reflection cannot be a different consciousness than the one of which reflection is conscious. But this
is precisely what Husserl affirms when he distinguishes internal perceiving from the act itself.
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 8th d., trans, and ed. C. K. Ogden
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). All references to the Tractatus will be cited with the ab-
breviation Tr and the proposition number following this edition.
7. Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galile, 1974).
8. Dieter Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein: Kritische Einleitung in eine Thorie," Hermeneutik und
Dialektik, ed. R. Bubner et al. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1970), I, p. 281.
Lecture 17
1. Dieter Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation: Eine Einleitung in die 'Wissenschaft der Logik
1
," Der
Idealismus una seine Gegenwart: Festschrift fur Werner Marx, ed. Ute Guzzoni et al. (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1976), pp. 208-30.
2. Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation," p. 215.
3. Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation," pp. 215-16.
4. Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation," pp. 217-18.
5. Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation," p. 218.
6. In this idea resides the motivation for conceiving Logic as a process of regulated determination
( Weiterbestimmung) of terms: it is the difference between the absence of a heteronomous presupposi-
tion and the supposition of a result that makes autonomous negation the incitement to a logical
progression.
7. Henrich, "Hegels Grundoperation," p. 219.
8. Logic, II, pp. 32fT. See also Dieter Henrich, "Hegels Logik der Reflexion," Hegel im Kontext
NOTES TO PAGES 269-304 J 467
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 95-156; see also my detailed comments in the book Der unendliche
Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfnge der Marxschen Dialektik, (Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1975), pp. 32-66, esp. pp. 51ff.
9. Schelling presents a particularly striking formulation for this paradoxical equality of contradic-
tion and identity: "Pure, immediate knowledge . . . [is] a recognition of contradiction, or of abso-
lute identity of the infinite and the finite, as the Highest" (SW, 1/8, p. 81).
10. TN: The phrase zu Grunde gehen contains an ambiguity in German similar to that inherent
in the word Aufhehung. Zu Grunde gehen means both, literally, "to go to the ground," and simultane-
ously "to perish" or "to be destroyed." Cf. Hegel's Logic, II, p. 70.
Lecture 18
1. William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?
1
' Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1912), pp. 1-38.
2. I am following here the essay by Dieter Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein: Kritische Einleitung in
eine Thorie," Hermeneutik und Dialektik, d. R. Bubner et. al. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1970), I, pp.
262-63 and 277.
3. Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein," p. 263.
4. See Saussure himself: "The linguistic entity exists only through the association of the signifier
with the signified. . . . Whenever only one element is retained, the entity vanishes; instead of a con-
crete object we are faced with a mere abstraction. . . . A succession of sounds is linguistic only if
it supports an idea. Considered independently, it is material for a physiological study, and nothing
more than that" (CGL, 102-3).
5. Lacan addressed a similar objection to the behaviorists: Le Sminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1978), II,
p. 64.
6. Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein," p. 271.
7. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 250-51.
8. Ibid. p. 250.
9. Paul Ricoeur, De l'interprtt ion: Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965).
10. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), XXII, p. 80.
11. Kafka, "A Country Doctor," The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa Muir
and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 220.
Lecture 19
1. Lacan, Le Sminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1978), II, p. 60.
2. Ren Descartes, by the way, himself already did this in relation to the cogitare/penser. He asks,
for example, in the Recherches de la Vrit: "In effect, is doubting anything more than thinking in
a certain way?" Oeuvres et lettres, ed. Andr Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 897.
3. Derrida also underlined this jumping over of the referential relation that the expression has with
a state of affairs, to the relation the expression has with other expressions, and he adds that the relation
of an expression to an I or to a mundane state of affairs is grounded in that other referencein the
differentiality of the signifiers. See, for example, SP (p. 89): "As a supplement, the signifier does not
represent first and simply the absent signified. Rather, it is substituted for another signifier, for an-
other type of signifier that maintains another relation with the deficient present." The distance of the
referent from the sign that points to it thus is itself founded in the structure of the ekstatic reference
in which by means of reciprocal delimitation-the expressions get their significance. Whenever a
468 G NOTES TO PAGES 305-325
subject attributes meaning to its acts, this meaning exists in the form of supplementarity, deferral,
substitution.
4. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973) pp. I83ff.
5. John C. Eccles, "Hirn und Bewusstsein," Mannheimer Forum (1977-78), pp. 15-16; see also
his The Brain and the Unity of the Consciousness Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1965).
Lecture 20
1. Gilles Deleuzeand Flix Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972), Mille Plateaux (Paris:
Minuit, 1980); henceforth cited as AO and MP, respectively. Page numbers for AO correspond to
Ami-Oedipus, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley, and Mark Seem (New York: Viking Press,
1977).
2. See also AO: "the production of production" (p. 4), "machine of machine" (passim).
3. Social Darwinism looked on Nietzsche as an "allied spirit"; we need only think, for example,
of the book by Alexander Tille, Von Darwin his Nietzsche (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1885). On the
historical context, see Hans-Giinter Zmarzlik, "Der Sozialdarwinismus in Deutschland als geschicht-
liches Problem," Vierteljahresschrift fur Zeitgeschichte, 11 (1963), pp. 246-73, and Gunter Altner,
d., Der Darwinismus: Die Geschichte einer Thorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-
schaft, 1981).
4. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,
1970).
5. Although it is precisely this age that is once again producing new shepherds.
6. Hegel, "Maximen des Journals der deutschen Literatur," Vieorie-Werkausgabe, II, p. 571.
7. Hegel, "Maximen des Journals der deutschen Literatur," Theorie-Werkausgahe, II, p. 542; cf.
also XX, pp. 444f., 452; IX, p. 9; Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2 vols. (London:
Swan Sonnenschein, 1910), pp. 108ff.
8. Deleuze, LS, p. 124: "This field cannot be determined like that of a consciousness: despite
Sartre's attempt, consciousness cannot be viewed as a milieu while rejecting the form of the person
and the perspective of individuation. A consciousness is nothing without the unifying synthesis, but
there is no unifying synthesis of consciousness without the form of the / or the perspective of the self
[Moi]."
Deleuze has apparently not followed the recent discussion on self-consciousness. He subscribes
to the standpoint of Kant and Husserl.
9. CGL, pp. 79-80; see de Mauro's comments on pp. 450-51 of his Edition critique, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Payot, 1980).
10. "Representation is always a social and psychic repression of desiring-production" (p. 184).
"The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use" (p. 109).
11. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1936).
12. Sartre, What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library,
1949), pp. 284-85.
13. I presented this view in more detail in my article "Die alte und die neue Mythologie in Thomas
Manns Doktor Faustus," Invaliden des Apoll: Motive undMythen des Dichterleids, ed. Herbert Anton
(Munich: Fink, 1982), pp. 78-94.
14. Let's not forget that Nietzsche characterized this "race" as "the Aryan race," even "physiologi-
c a l l y ' ^ ^ ^ , XIII, p. 26) 'x\<\"the Jews" {p. 30) as the establishes of culture, of law, the penitentiary
system: in short, of "resentment." A "cultural-historical" interpretation of these statements does not
even come into question, since in the entire Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche works with concepts like
"blood" ("blood poisoning"), "race," "heredity," and "physiology." (That distinguishes the "genealogi-
cal" explanation from the social-historical one which Nietzsche so thoroughly despised!)
NOTES TO PAGES 326-344 469
15. "It substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the
flows in a bound state on the body of capital" (AO, 246).
16. Of course, he already has a hard time in late-capitalism. Since the unfettered exchange under-
mines all values, even that of morality, religion, authority, and the symbolic father, Oedipus fights
for his last territory.
17. See my study Die unendliche Fahrt: Ein Motiv und sein Text (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
18. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Kreisleriana," Fantasie- und Nachtstiicke, ed. Walter Muller-Seidel
(Munich: Winkler, 1960); Ludwig Tieck, Die Reisenden, Gesammeite Novellen (Berlin: Reimer,
1852), I, 167-270.
19. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indian Hills,
Colo.: Falcon's Wing Press, 1958), I, 429: "But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense,
in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard
only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and
general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and
be a lasting monument of German stupidity/
Lecture 21
1. Compare this to the following remark by Husserl, which nicely supplements this context: "But
truly senseless speech would be no speech at all: it would be like the rattle of machinery" (Logical
Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], I, 303).
2. On p. 358 of AO one can find the following definition of primary production: "The libido is
caught up in molecular desiring-production and knows nothing of persons just as it knows nothing
of the egoeven the most undifferentiated ego of narcissism since its investments are already
differentiated, but differentiated according to the prepersonal regime of partial objects, of singulari-
ties, of intensities, of gears and parts of machines of desire." Would there accordingly be a presemi-
otic differentiation? A quasi-natural distinctiveness of individuals?
3. For a fleeting moment the thought occurs to me, like a shooting star, that it is the author himself
who, by virtue of the individuality of his writing (criture)-i. e., by virtue of his style-breaks down
and alters the universality of grammar: "Yet it has been a long time since Engels demonstrated, al-
ready apropos of Balzac, how an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows
and causing them to circulate, flows that split asunder the catholic and despotic signifier of his work,
and that necessarily nourish a revolutionary machine on the horizon. That is what style is, or rather
the absence of styleasyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by
what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow,
and to explode desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production
and not an expression" (AO, 133). I will return to the idea of a nonuniversal and nonsignificant in-
dividual that undermines the identity of the universal, linked by Deleuze to style, in the context of
my reading of Diffrence et rptition; see also MP, 123ff.
4. Again and again mention is made in Anti-Oedipus of the "[anoedipal] order of production" (p.
100) or of the order of desire (passim).
5. Quoted by Sartre, What is Literature! Trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1949), p. 132.
6. Sartre, What is Literature!, pp. 183-84; see also the fantasies of aglobal inferno and of univer-
sal destruction in the work of Nazi authors, cited by Sartre in Situations, II, pp. 227-28.
7. Nietzsche, Works, XIII, 65.
8. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgahe seiner Schriften, ed. Ernst Behler (Munich, Paderborn,
Vienna: Schningh, 1958f\), II, p. 153.
470 G NOTES TO PAGES 345-367
Lecture 22
1. Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, in
press). Page references correspond to Mille Plateaux (MP).
2. E. T. A. Hoffmann, "Kreisleriana," Fantasie- und Nachtstucke, ed. Walter Muller-Seidel
(Munich: Winkler, 1960), p. 49.
3. Fichte, Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Hans Jacob (Berlin: Junker and Dunnhaupt, 1957), II,
p. 368.
4. R. Jacobsen and J. Lotz, "Notes on the French Phonematic Pattern," Word, 5 (1949), p. 155.
5. The same is true for the notion of a systme acentr [MP, 26), which nevertheless would still
be a "system."
6. Hegel, Encyclopdie, paragraph 462, Zusatz, Theorie-Werkausgabe, X, 279-80.
7. Ibid., p. 278.
8. I demonstrated this in greater detail in "Einverstandnis und Vielsinnigkeit (oder: Das Auf-
brechen der Bedeutungseinheit im 'eigentlichcn Gesprch')," Poetik und Hermeneutik XI: Das
Gesprch, ed. Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1984).
9. For example, when they write, "Inexact expressions are needed to designate something exactly'
1
{MP, 31): a false conclusion that is structurally similar to the statement that in order to see rectangles
we need a rectangular brain.
10. That, of course, does not mean that one would have to deny the coercive character of relations
of domination. But it does mean that one attributes this coercion not to structures but rather to in-
dividuals. Only individuals can coerce or repress other individuals.
Lecture 23
1. Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition (Paris: PUF, 1968); henceforth cited as DR.
2. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph, 1 (1977), p. 199; henceforth
cited as R.
3. Immanuel Kant s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Humanities
Press, 1950), A 320, B 377, p. 314.
4. See Nikolaus of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, Book II, chapter 6.
5. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, ed. Rudolf Odebrecht (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1942), pp. 290 and
295-96.
6. Ibid., pp. 198 and 290.
7. Schleiermacher, Psychologic Smtliche Werke, ed. L. George (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1862),
HI/4, p. 77.
8. Schleiermacher, HuK, p. 411.
9. August Boeckh, Enzyklopdie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaften, ed.
Ernst Bratuschek (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), p. 83.
10. Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), p.66.
11. Sartre speaks off concepts or significations (exactly as do Schleiermacher and Boeckh, in-
cidentally) whenever he wants to designate the communicable product of a process of understanding;
on the other hand, he speaks of meaning whenever he refers to the process of producing signification
as such. He believes that every universal concept is grounded in individual meaning.
12. Sartre, Situations, (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), VIII, p. 450.
13. Sartre, Situations, VIII, pp. 437, 449-50.
14. Sartre, L'idiot de la famille, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1971-72), III, 29; henceforth cited as
IF.
15. Plato, The Republic, 293 E ff.; Aristotle, 77K? Politics, 1284 a 13-14.
16. See Manfred Frank, Das kalte Hen (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981).
NOTES TO PAGES 368-381 471
17. Tullio de Mauro, "Introduction," in Saussure, Cours de linguistique gnrale, 2nd d. (Paris:
Payot, 1980), pp. v-vi.
18. Boeckh, Enzyklopdie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaften, p. 126.
19. Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, ed Adolf Fris (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), VIII, pp. 1404
and 1151; IV, p. 1212. See also my essay on Musil's treatment of individuality: "Auf der Suche nach
cinem Grund: Ueber den Umschlag von Erkenntniskritik in Mythologie bei Musil," Mythos und
Moderne, ed. Karl Heinz Bohrer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 318-62.
20. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. A. Leitzmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaft-
liche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), V, p. 418.
21. Saussure, CFS, 15 (1957), p. 72.
Lecture 24
1.1 have demonstrated extensively how this is conceived by Hlderlin in my Der unendliche Man-
gel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfnge der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1975), pp. 22-23.
2. I am borrowing this phrase from part I, paragraph 3 of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, trans.
Peter Heath and John Lucks (1970; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 110:
"Every opposite is like its opponent in one respect, = X; and every like is opposed to its like in one
respect, = X. Such a respect, = X, is called the ground, in the first case of conjunction, and in the
second of distinction."
3. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartstone and Paul Weiss (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), VI, p. 32; henceforth cited as Coll P.
4. Henrich, "Selbstbewusstsein: Kritische Einleitung in eine Thorie," Hermeneutik und Dialek-
tik, ed. R. Bubner et. al. (Tubingen: Mohr, 1970), p. 275: "It is a matter of describing consciousness
in such a way that it is neither conscious self-relation nor identification with itself, but conceiving it
at the same time in such a way that it is conceded that we are immediately familiar with con-
sciousness."
5. Henrich, ibid., p. 271.
6. Let me add in this context that Derrida began a penetrating investigation into the problematics
of self-consciousness in modern philosophy, which he later unfortunately did not continue, in his early
essay on "Cogito and the History of Madness" (from 1963, reprinted in WD, pp. 31-63). I will leave
out the critical reference to Foucault and underline only that Derrida regards the Cartesian cogito as
a "project of singular and unprecedented excess": "an excess which overflows the totality of that which
can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings" (WD, 57). In other words, the ex-
perience of self-consciousness, due to its priorness, goes beyond all other experiences as limited ex-
perience of something, including the totality of beings and of history, which are only presented in
the light of this "hyperbolic extremity" {WD, 58). Only the recourse to a divine guarantee connected
Descartes's project to that of metaphysics: "As soon as Descartes has reached this extremity, he seeks
to reassure himself, to certify the Cogito through God, to identify the act of the Cogito with a reason-
able reason. And he does so as soon as he proffers and reflects the Cogito" (WD, 58). According to
this, the cogito, as the experience of a "familiarity with itself'that is attendant even in madness, would
be prereflective; and only in the gesture of wanting to express and reflect would it become "the" cogito
as the seat of the highest certitude, which, in addition, is founded in God. The decisive aspect of this
view is that it distinguishes the cogito itself from its (reflective or linguistic) representation (and in-
strumentalization in the service of a methodical self-certification and world domination), but it does
this in such a way that it does not deny consciousness i.e., subjectivityto that which precedes
representation, as Deleuze seems to do. Derrida also seems to conceive the "hyperbolic act of the
Cogito" as individual, since he sharply delimits it from intersubjective communication, "that is, as
472 [J NOTES TO PAGES 381-415
soon as he reflects the Cogito for the other, which means for oneseir (WD, 59). And finally, he seems
to conceive it as diffrance (61-62), so that in the originary cogito individuality, self-consciousness,
prereflectivity, and differentiality would be united. To be sure, one has to think of this unification as
a unification, and Derrida is far from doing that.
7. "Asignificance" here does not mean "senselessness" but rather "without significance," following
the distinction made earlier.
8. Novalis, Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960ff.), Ill, p.
451.
9. Derrida, GR, pp. 6Iff.
10. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1953), pp. 11-12; henceforth cited as PL
11. John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969).
12. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
Lecture 25
1. Wittgenstein, PL p. 13.
2. The term was coined by Husserl.
3. For the Derrida-Gadamer debate, see Text und Interpretation: Deutsch-Franzsische Dbatte,
2nded.,ed. Philippe Forget (Munich: Fink, 1983). See also the special issue of the Revue Internation-
ale de Philosophie, 151 (1984), ed. Manfred Frank, which documents parts of this debate in French.
4. Searle, "Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," language, Mind and Society, ed. Keith Gunderson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 344-69; reprinted in Searle, Expression and
Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
5. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. L Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan
Smith, ed. Jonathan Re (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 98.
6. H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," Speech Acts, vol. 3, Syntax and Semantics, ed. P.
Coles and J. L. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 41-58. I have argued in detail to
what extent this is the case in my reflections devoted to the controversy between Derrida and Searle,
"Die Entropie der Sprache," Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp.
141-210, esp. p. 178.
7. Wittgenstein, PI, p. 85.
8. Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Grundziige des allgemeinen Sprachtyps," Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
A. Leitzmann (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1968), V, p. 388; see also Humboldt,
Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, trans. George C. Buck and Frithjof A. Raven
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 41 and 65.
Lecture 26
1. Ludwig Feuerbach, "Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie," Gesammelte Werke, ed. W.
Schuffenhauer (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970), IX, p. 40.
2. For. Husserl it is, inversely, the ideality of "meaning" (Meinung) (of signification-bestowing
intention), which abstracts from the psychophysical act of the intimation of expression or judgment,
as well as from the "vanishing noise that can never recur identically" and from the spatiotemporal
reference that guarantees the "sameness" or "identity" "in the repetition of the statement." Here the
identity in meaning of what is repeated is subordinated to the principle of the ideal unity of the sig-
nified: ideality commands reality. See Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. F. Findlay (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), I, pp. 284-89.
NOTES TO PAGES 416-424 473
3. See Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfange
der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 236-45; Sartre, ET, pp. 150ff.
4. Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations, ed. P. T. Geach, trans. P. T. Geach and R. H. StoothofT
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p, 15.
5. Frege, Logical Investigations, p. 17.
6. Frege, Logical Investigations, pp. 21-22.
7. Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, p. 314.
8. Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, p. 315.
9. Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, p. 316.
10. Husserl, Logical Investigations, pp. 315-16; see also SP, pp. 72-73. The distinction between
"occasional" and "objective meanings" is first brought up in the Logical Investigations on the example
of the index word "I," but it is in no way exhausted with the problematics of sentences in which T"
designates an individual subject (which is always qualified by Husserl as being "empirical"). Husserl
in general distinguishes-this is a leitmotif of the entire second volume of the German edition of the
logical Investigations, from the introduction onward (I, pp. 248ff.)"between the act of meaning,
on the one hand, and meaning itself, on the other, the ideal unity as against the multiplicity of possible
acts" (I, p. 312). Meaning made evident in originary essential intuition is transcontextual and transoc-
casiona!, it is an "ideal unit of meaning" over against the "shifting acts of meaning" (I, p. 312) as an
empirical-grammatical operation in changing situations. Nevertheless, it remains true that Husserl
labels all "ambiguous" and "shifting expressions" that deviate from the hypostatized ideal unity of
meaning as "essentially subjective" (I, p. 321). This means that the function of the index designating
an individual can implicitly be found in forms of utterance that do not expressly make use of an "I,"
given that they are nonobjective, occasional, and shifting according to "subjective idea and thought"
(in Frege's sense of "idea"). (See mainly section 28 of Husserl's first investigation, pp. 320-22.) We
see that Derrida takes over the methodological imperative of disregarding the occasionally of "sig-
nifying" {des Bedeutens), in order to guarantee the ideality of "significations," without, to be sure,
concluding, as Husserl does, that there is an ideal identity of objectively founded significations. Ex-
pressing it paradoxically, one could say that Derrida assumes an ideal nonidentity (not of individual
signifying, but) of signification(s).
11. At least the reduction of individuality is an essential tendency of phenomenology. In practice,
however, the matter is far more complex. While Husserl considers that index words such as "here,
yesterday, this one," etc., are replaceable by "objective expressions," he is of the opinion that the sig-
nification of "I" cannot be absolutely sublated into that of an objective or exact (i.e., theoretically
defined) expression. The ambiguity of "I" is not the ambiguity of a homonym or an equivocation; it
cannot be eliminated by inserting the sum of all proper names, which alternately make use of this ex-
pression, into the place of "I." For, according to Husserl, "undoubtedly the idea of self-reference,
as well as an implied pointing to the individual idea of the speaker, also belong, after a certain fash-
ion" to the semantics of "I" (I, p. 316). "I" can therefore not be reduced to the universal signifying
function of the index word, it does not coincide semantically with "whatever speaker is designating
himself (I, p. 315). In this it is different from Wittgenstein's and Tugendhat's reductionism. On p.
320 Husserl determines the ineradicability and unomissibility of the implicit and explicit reference
to the speaking individual subject as being of a principal nature; the signification of "I" cannot be trans-
formed into an ideal language that would found an ideal-objective signifying of "I" instead of a shifting
one (section 28, pp. 320-22).
12. Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, p. 316.
13. In the first part of this passage I replaced la trace twice with la diffrance, for reasons of adapt-
ing it to the context of the passage, and with a justification Derrida himself emphasizes in the second
passage cited.
14. See Wolfgang Hogrebe's review article of Herbert Schnadelbach, Reflexion und Diskurs: Fra-
474 rj NOTES TO PAGES 424-449
gen an eine Logik der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), in Zeitschrift fur philosophische For-
schung, 36(1982), p. 289.
15. Derrida explicitly does this at various points. I will mention only one: "This movement of
differance is not something that happens to a transcendental subject; it produces a subject" ( P, 82).
Lecture 27
1. A structural or principal possibility is not, as Derrida demonstrated very nicely, an eventuality:
"have to be able to" does not mean "happens perhaps" (LI, 183-86).
2. Derrida, "Le facteur de la vrit," Potique, 21 (1975), pp. 96-147. Published in English as
"The Purveyor of Truth," Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), pp. 31-113.
3. Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," p. 57.
4. Ibid., pp. 92-93.
5. Ibid., pp. 58, 59, 63; see also pp. 65-66, 78-100.
6. Derrida, "La Facteur de la vrit," p. 124 (the English Yale French Studies translation skips
the section from pp. 122-24).
7. Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth," pp. 88-89.
8. Ibid., pp. 94-98.
9. Ibid., p. 100.
10. Manfred Frank, "Das \vahre Subjekt' und sein Doppel: Jacques Lacans Hermeneutik," Das
Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 114-40.
11. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 225-26.
12. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lucks (1970; rpt. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 110.
13. Peirce, Coll P, V, p. 3; see also V, 277-78; VIII, 184, 187-89.
14. Cf. Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und -interpretation nach
Schleiermacher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 322ff.
15. See the penetrating remarks by Christian Stetter, "Peirce und Saussure," Kodikas/Code, 2
(1979), pp. 124-49, esp. 135-36.
16. The idea of the ultimately determining consciousness of a speaker can actually be found in
Saussure himself. It is characterized there as the only measuring stick for the judgments of the linguist
(CFS, 15 [1957J, p. 75).
17. Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, Samtliche Werke (Berlin:
Reimer, 1843), 1/1, p. 56.
18. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), III, p. 656.
19. Todorov, "Texte," Dictionnaire encyclopdique des sciences du langage, ed. Oswald Ducrot
and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 375-82.
20. Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, Smtliche Werke, 1/1, p. 58.
21. A. N. Whitehead, "Verstehen," Die Hermeneutik und die Wissenschaften, ed. Hans-Georg
Gadamer and G. Boehm (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 71; cf. BoehnVs preface, p. 27.
22. Humboldt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, trans. George C. Buck and
Frithjof A. Raven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 43.
23. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 8.
24. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:
Verso, 1974), pp. 16-18.
25. I gave some indications of the path toward this in Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare, pp. 36ff.,
85-108, 184-203, esp. 190rf.
26. Sartre, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). II, p. 305.
Index
Allhusser. Louis. 2?. W-92. <
168-70. ISS. 189
Amrv. Jean. 121
AiiM-hiiiiunii. 37. 218. 227. 22
Anthropology . slructural. 3411'
Apel. Karl-Otto. SI. 218
Aragon. Louis. 343
Archaeologv. 97. 102. 104. 1
126. 128. 137. 144. 146.
164-66
Archive. 98 163. 164. 173. 1
Aristotle. 365. 424
Artaud. Antomn. 330. 343
Articulation. 36. 37. 34. 66. (
94. 121. 125. 139. 282. 3(
340. 375. 377. 388. 426
Austin. John. \ \ i . 82. 221. 3
L
Bachelard. Gaston, xiv. 102.
Bakhtm. Mikhal. 443
W-101. 150.
!9
09-13. 121.
79. 18|
i9. 73. 75. 90.
M. 301. Mb.
X.)-y. 404
104. 108
Banal
Baudr
Becke
Benjai
Benve
VII
Bergs.
Bcrke
B.rus.
Blancl
Bluiik
Boeck
Bopp.
P"
Te
Boige
Broni:
Bretoi
Bultin
Busch
illard. Jean. win. 25. .
tl. Samuel. 330 d '
min. Walter, xvi
niste. Emit. 21. 41; /',
nuque gnnik. 4 1
on. Henri. \ii
ley. George. 211
Hendnk. 124. 136
Uni. Maurice. 330
jnberg. Hans. 78
h. August. 370. 409
Franz. 120. 139. 144:
ri.vwi ,,/ilic Sunskrit. C
uumic Ltinguages. 139
s. Jorge Luis. 104
ino. Iran?. 194. 233
i. Andre. 341
ann. Rudolf. 8
. Wilhclni. 301
478 INDEX
Cassirer, Ernst. Substance and function in
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, tOO
Chamberlain. Houston Stewart. 342
Chladen. Johann Martin. 119
Chomsky. Noam. 120, 347. 351. 406
Closure. 20. 61. 240, 333. 334. 395. 427. 428
Consciousness. 61. 89. 154. 165. 169. 197.
200, 203. 206-9. 217. 219-24. 232. 238,
241, 247, 249, 251, 281, 284-87. 291.
306. 310-13. 322, 323. 350. 380. 381.
385. 387. 414. 417, 418, 440. 441; of
eternal time, 246. 251; reflection model
of. 193, 227, 234, 273. 275; theory of.
xx, 10, 96. 124. 205. 229
Croce. Benedetto. 368
Cuvicr, Georges. 138-39
Dali. Salvador. 177
Darwin. Chartes. 88, 111. 153. 193. 208
Dasein, xx, xxv. xxix, 5, 17, 24, 28, 60. 75.
87. 88. 90, 98, 99, 190. 196. 197, 200,
243. 286. 306
Deconstruction, xi, xiv, xxviii, xxxvi,
xxxviiif.. 70. 86, 128, 216. 217. 253, 258,
315
Deleuze. Gilles, x. xivf.. xxxiiif., 10. 24-27,
143, 181. 192. 195, 201, 287. 288. 313;
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 315-60;
Diffrante et rptition, 366-99. 407
Derrida. Jacques, x-xliv. 11. 24-27. 38. 48.
53. 58-77, 87. 90, 98, MO. 116, 119.
121. 128. 137. 142. 143, 149, 164. 165.
177. 186-88. 192. 193. 196. 199. 211.
214. 216-18; critique of Hegel. 262-88.
302, 315, 323, 343. 346. 353, 358, 362.
374. 378. 387-93; critique of Husserl'
phenomenology. 221-53. 258-61; critique
of Husserl's theory of signs. 410-26.
430-38. 442-48; critique of Searie,
399-109
Descartes. Rene, xii, 135, 137, 146, 166.
191, 198. 297-99. 310. 374. 377
Diffrance. 70. 71. 74. 75. 76. 90. 223. 228.
233. 240. 253. 256, 257, 262. 264.
269-72. 274. 275, 279. 285. 366. 378.
388. 389. 403. 408. 416. 421-26. 432.
436-38. 447
Dilthey. Wilhelm. 170. 239. 240
Discourse, xiv. xvi. 105, 141, 144. 148. 162.
165. 166. 170. 174, 175. 176. 180. 181.
185, 187. 189, 371, 396, 414. 426
Dissemination, iwxvtii, 76. 82. 84. 142, 173.
236
Don Quixote, 114
Droysen. Adolph. 9. 449
Durkheim. Emit. S3
Eccles. John, 313
Ego, transcendental. 230-32, 239, 242. 254.
415
Ehrenzweig, Anton, xvi
Engler. Rudolf. 22
Episteme, xxxii. 18, 22. 23. 27. 54. 61, 105.
109. 111-14. 120. 121, 127, 130, 133.
135. 151. 152. 155. 159. 160. 162. 163.
167
Epoch. 230
Espacement. 149
Ethics, xvii. xx. xxiii. 46, 112. 155. 216.
255, 447, 449
Existentialism, xiif.. 315. 317
Familiarity, prereflectivc. xxxv. 200, 280,
281. 286, 287. 310. 363. 374. 377. 379,
385
Feuerbach. Ludwig. 147. 168. 193. 320. 410
Fichte. Johann Gottlieb, 58. 59. 89. 90. 92,
126, 136, 146. 147. 151. 190-94, 198.
200. 211. 230. 259. 261. 264, 328, 351,
363, 374, 432; Science of Knowledge, 58,
90,432
Flaubert, Gustave, xxxiii
Flying Dutchman. The, 329-30
Foucault. Michel, x-xliv. 10. 13. 14. 25. 27.
48. 54. 61. 65. 77, 90-92. 94-101; 7Ji<r
Archaeology of Knowledge. 166-89. 191.
193. 201. 221. 287. 317. 330. 335. 341.
343. 351, 357. 393. 394. 447; The Order
of Things, 102-75
Frankfurt School, xiii. xxi. 5. 81. 83. 290,
449
Frege. Gottlob. 361. 418. 419
Freud. Amalie. 321
Freud. Jacob. 321
Freud. Sigmund. 22. 53. 88. 89. 97. 117,
141, 142, 147. 151. 156. 157. 159. 160.
193. 199. 290-97. 303. 307. 310. 314.
315. 318. 328. 332. 430; Interpretation of
INDEX 479
Dreams, 290; New Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-analysis, 290
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xiii. xxv-xxix.
xxxviif.. xlif.. 5. 8. 12. 84. 87-89. 97,
99. 110. 288. 289, 398
Genette. Gerard. 21
Gentile. Emilio, 324. 342
Gilbert of Poitier. 362
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, comte de, 342
Godelier. Maurice, 188
Greimas. Julien A.. 21, 48, 57, 427; Sman-
tique structurale, 57
Grice, H. P., 395.406,414
Grimm. Jacob, 120. 139. 144; Deutsche
Grammatik, 139
Guattari. Flix. 10. 181. 313; Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. 315-60
Habermas, Jurgen, xviii-xxii. xxxviii, 5,
78-80. 85. 153, 218
Hamann, Johann Georg. 163, 207
Hauff, Wiwelra. 367
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xiii, xviii,
xxi. 9, 13-18. 21-23, 30, 60. 68. 71, 75.
77, 83, 96, 106. 111, 128, 144, 165.
167-71. 190. 191. 194, 216. 228, 231.
239, 259. 261. 262-80, 284, 286. 293.
303. 307. 320. 331. 349. 350, 354. 363.
403. 423, 430, 445, 446; Jena Logic, 271;
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 15;
Phenomenology of Mind, 276, 290; The
Philosophy of Right, 14, 269; Science of
Logic, 403
Heidegger. Martin, xiiif., xvii, xxv, xxix, 5.
6, 8. 20. 22, 24. 26, 38, 52. 54, 57, 59.
61, 87-102. 104. 108, 110, 137. 147. 151.
164, 190-93, 196-200, 203. 205, 207.
212, 216. 217. 222. 243. 259. 260.
284-86. 301. 308, 320, 325. 375. 386.
390
Henrich. Dieter, xiii. xxxiv. 265. 269. 271.
274. 287. 380
Herder. Johann Gottfried, xii. HI . 129. 163.
207. 223. 224; Verstand und Erfahrung:
Eine Metakrilik zur Kritik der reinen Ver-
nunfi, 223
Hermeneutics, xi. xvii, xxv-xliv, 3-11, 26,
27. 79. 86. 109. 113. 127. 130. 141. 143.
152. 164, 167. 174. 289, 316. 355. 358.
364. 386. 401. 417, 418. 424, 430, 438,
439, 445. 448. 449; effective-historical. 8;
of empathy, 8; existential, 8; romantic, 8.
176, 353, 442, 447
Historicism. 152, 167
Historiography, xi
History, x, xv, xvii, 27, 77, 126. 150, 166;
model of. 168; theory of. 165, 171. 188
Hitler, Adolph. 21, 342
Hjelmslev, Louis. 31, 32, 101, 326. 406. 443
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor August, 330
Hldertin, Friedrich von, 147. 194, 268. 375
Horkbeimcr, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment,
xxi. 78
Houdebine. Jean-Louis, 257
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 22. 30, 75. 84. 139.
144, 153. 158. 207. 211. 223, 322. 360.
370. 371. 406. 409. 434. 445
Hume, David. 153
Husserl. Edmund, xiii, xvii, xxxiii, 68, 89.
93, 107, 108. 194, 195. 211, 218. 219.
221-53. 258. 259. 261. 262. 302. 399.
410-25, 432-39
Idealism. 7. 105. 316; German, 6. 13, 15. 52.
89. 134, 135. 152. 191. 199, 264
Ideology, xi. xvi
Individual, xxxi. xxxv. 362. 365. 366, 369.
381. 383, 445
Individuality, xxxiv. xxxvi. 171, 174. 180,
186, 353, 358. 359, 362-64. 367, 368.
371. 376. 379. 382. 384. 388. 389. 407.
418-20. 436, 437, 446
Intentkmality. 218. 219, 224. 248, 318, 339.
391-93, 396. 397. 404, 413. 420
Interpretation, x, xxv-xliv. 95, 110. 112, 204.
205. 283. 284. 291, 354, 355. 364, 368.
384. 389, 392. 397. 409. 416. 426.
430-37. 442. 445, 447
Iterability. 360-64, 400, 402-5. 411. 415.
419. 421. 423-25. 440
Jacobsen. Roman. 68
James. William. 96. 247. 279
Joyce, James, 348
Judgment, hypothetical, 380. 384. 416, 417.
433-37. 441
Jung, Edgar. 325
Kafka. Franz. 291. 324. 330
480 INDEX
Kant, Immanuel, xii, xii, 36, 52, 89. 115.
124. 128. 130, 134-39. 146, 151-53. 163,
185, 190. 193, 202. 203. 210. 223. 224.
239, 334, 348, 377, 379, 385. 413, 441;
Critique of Pure Reason. 377
Kierkegaard, Seren, xii, xviii, 87. 147, 193
Kinship: relations of, 38, 325; systems of,
xxxii. 34
Klein, Melanie. 321, 328
Klossowski, Pierre: Nietzsche et le cercle
vicieux, 339
Koselleck, Reinhart. 77
Koyr, Alexander, 271
Kristeva. Julia, 25, 66, 222, 443
Lacan, Jacques, x-xliv. 48, 64. 65. 83. 96-98.
106, 148, 165, 177, 192. 193. 202, 20S,
206. 211, 212, 214, 217. 275, 278. 281,
285, 287-316. 321-23, 331. 336, 338.
354, 374, 378, 427-33
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 111
Langue, 28-31, 35, 40-44. 46, 65, 66, 69,
72, 95, 107, 164, 172, 175, 176, 302,
304, 306. 336, 338, 352. 371. 389, 406,
439, 441
Lawrence, D. H., 330
Lefebvre, Henri, xiv
Leftbvre-Pontalis, Germain, 311, 313, 314
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 124, 135,
193, 194, 240, 362, 363
Leiris, Michel, xiv
Leroux, Pierre, 11
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 21, 25, 27. 32-65, 71,
79, 107, 160, 172, 327
Lvinas, Emmanuel, xiv, 22, 217
Living present, 242-44, 246. 247. 250, 412
Logocentrism, 121, 365
Lorcnzer, Alfred, 218, 293
Luhmann, Niklas, xiii, xix, xxiii-xxv, xxxviii,
33. 78, 79. 83, 85: Legitimation durch
Verfahren, 78
Lutber. Martin, 328
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, x, xiv, xxxiii, xxxviii,
19. 20, 24. 25, 27. 77-87. 93, 135, 288.
381
Mach. Ernst. 96
Machine, desiring, 317, 318, 321, 323. 325,
333. 338-40. 352
Mallarm. Stphane. 52. 132. 140, 142. 143.
149. 151
Malthus, Thomas Robert. 153
Mann, Thomas: Doctor Faustus, 325, 329
Marcel, Gabriel, xiv
Mark, 66, 76, 279. 281, 283. 284, 287. 408.
409. 423, 433-36
Marx, Karl, xiii, xxi. 5, 37, 53, 78. 80, 87.
88. 95, 120. 127, 138, 141, 151. 153,
168, 169, 327, 342, 367; Capital. 327
Marxism, xii, 21, 37. 94, 120. 152, 161, 167
Mauro, Tullio de, 368
Maurras. Charles, 325
Meaning, x, xxxi, 60. 75, 215, 334, 340,
341, 354, 355. 363, 364, 379, 413. 416.
429, 433; theory of. 386
Meillet. Antoine. 120
Meninas, Las, 122. 145
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxxv
Metaphysics, xvf., 17, 20, 27, 53. 134. 149.
286, 349, 422; critique of, 5, 22, 216, 217
Mill. John Stuart. 109
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. 325
Monism, neutral, 96
Musil, Robert. 239, 370
Natorp, Paul. 211,230
Negation, autonomous, 265-72, 274, 275, 280
Newton, Isaac, xii
Nietzsche. Friedrich, xviif.. xxii, xxxiv. 5.
16-18. 20-22. 82. 84. 86-89. I l l , 117.
129. 132, 140. 141, 143. 144, 149. 151.
153-55. 183, 186. 187. 190. 199-213,
222, 259, 319. 325, 331, 333. 338. 342,
393. 394, 445: The Genealogy of Morals,
181, 201, 333. 394; The Joyful Wisdom.
16, 18, 208; The Twilight of the Idols, 210
Nouvelle Droite, 155
Novalis. 122, 147. 194, 377
Oken. Lorenz, 320
Ontology, xvi. xxvf., 149. 197. 198. 216, 217
Ontotheology. 286
Order, xv. 106-8. 126, 179, 183; of dis-
course. 177; symbolic. 106. 130. 284,
285. 301, 303-5, 308, 313. 323, 329. 341.
353, 366, 388, 397. 398, 417. 433
Otherness. 438
Parmenides. 190, 191.364
INDEX 481
Parole. 28, 40-42, 44, 46, 82, 107, 175, 176,
178. 283, 352. 368, 428. 440
Parsons, Talcott, 33
Pascal, Biaise. 18
Perrce, Charles Sanders. 5, 81, 361, 380.
388, 389. 407, 408, 432. 433. 435, 436,
438.448
Phenomenological reduction, 224, 247. 411.
418
Phenomenology, xiif., 141, 142. 231-53, 311,
317, 411-13, 416, 417. 419. 421
Philosophy: analytic, xiif., xx, xxx, 3. 9. 22.
142. 166. 167. 211. 215. 216. 220. 229.
309. 316. 317. 346. 386. 388. 403. 417.
439. 448; French, 3, 8. 449; German. 8.
79, 137; of history, xiv. xvii, xxiv, 80,
167. 189; or life, xvii; romantic. 283. 320;
transcendental, 133
Piaget, Jean, 32, 56, 172
Plato, 365. 406. 412. 424. 446
Port Royal: grammar of. 120. 122. 123. 124;
logic of, 124
Positivism, xii. 134, 189
Postmodern situation. 87
Presence. 61. 69. 74. 137. 196. 199. 206.
215, 231. 235, 238. 241. 242, 270, 274.
365, 398, 412, 413. 416, 421. 426
Protension, 246. 253
Proust. Marcel, 330, 442
Ranke. Theodor. 111
Rationalism, x-xliv
Rauschning, Hermann. 21
Reason, xxviii; communicative, xxif.
Reflection, model of. 122, 248, 250, 280.
316. 377, 380
Rcinhold, Karl Lconhard. 124. 136. 151, 193
Representation, xvf., 118, 124, 136, 143,
145, 157. 158. 160, 162, 163, 165. 166,
199, 212. 322. 323, 326. 332, 335, 341,
356, 359. 372. 373. 376. 378. 379. 383
Restance, 73. 431. 434
Retention, 244. 246, 247, 249, 250. 251, 253
Rhizome, 317. 347. 349, 350. 351, 356
Ricardo, David, 120, 138, 328
Richard of Saint Victor, 362
Ricoeur. Paul, xxix-xxxi, xxxvii, xliii, 25, 51,
52, 108. 221. 289. 290. 293, 430; De /In-
terprtation: Essai sur Freud. 290
Rhm, Ernst. 324
Romanticism, xvi, xviiif., 22, 103, 136. 153,
164, 192. 375
Ronse. Henri. 67
Rosenberg. Alfred, 324, 325; Dtr Myihus des
zwangsten Jahrhunderts. 324
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53
Russell. Bertrand. 96, 142
Sartre. Jean-Paul. xiii. xxxiii, 5, 9. 37, 87,
102. 104. 166, 170. 180, 184. 190,
194-97, 200, 211, 230, 231, 275, 277,
283. 288, 292, 298. 309, 310. 322. 324.
329. 330. 338. 341. 357. 364-66, 369,
372, 382. 384. 404. 416. 422. 442,
447-49
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 21-89. 93. 94, 97,
98. 103. 116. 117. 119, 121, 125. 126.
140. 160. 161. 163. 175. 212. 217. 223.
237, 270, 281. 282, 301, 303-5, 322. 326.
357. 362. 367-69, 371, 382. 383, 403,
406. 411. 426. 428, 429, 433. 439,
440-42, 444. 447, 448
Scarpetta, Guy, 257
Scheler, Max. 319
Schelhng. Joseph Friedrich Wilhelm, 11. 15,
36, 51. 87. 102, 110, 147, 151, 169, 192,
195. 259. 260, 262. 263, 268. 273.
276-78. 282. 291. 297. 298, 309. 319,
416. 423: Philosophy of Mythology. 51
Schizophrenia, 316-60
Schlegel, Friedrich, 139, 153, 344
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xi. xxxiif., 8. 9.
22. 36. 55. 84, 89, 90, 117, 141, 147,
158. 174, 180, 194, 195, 211, 212. 217.
223. 281. 309. 316. 354. 357. 363. 366.
369. 371, 372, 382, 384. 390. 409, 432.
441-45, 447, 448; Christian Faith. 90;
Ober den Begriffder Hermeneutik, 445
Schmalenbach. Hans, 194
Schopenhauer. Arthur, xii, 138, 146. 147.
151, 200. 211. 321. 331. 334
Scarlc. John. xxi. 5. 69, 188, 221. 360, 361,
364, 369. 390. 392-402. 404-8, 410,
412-15, 417. 420. 421. 427. 438; Speech
Acts. 392. 405. 413
Self-consciousness, xx, xxxiv, 9. 93, 98. 126,
131. 147. 148, 157. 161. 185. 207. 220.
223, 229, 233. 237-39. 261, 279. 281,
287, 289. 334. 348. 374. 379. 384. 386.
397, 421; absolute, 54, 146; immediate.
198. 227; nonpositing. 195. 253. 278;
reflective/relational, 200, 218. 248. 252.
260, 276. 307. 309, 376. 377
Semiology. 126, 132
Serre, Michel, xiv. xviii
Signification, 128, 157. 213, 215, 223. 274.
284, 290, 322. 379. 382, 407-9. 426, 433.
435, 441
Signified, xxxii, 22. 30. 31, 37, 39. 64.
66-77. 96. 114. 115. 125. 127. 133, 302.
332, 367, 372, 427, 428
Signifier, xxxii. 22, 30. 31. 37. 39. 64.
66-77. 96, 114. 115. 12S. 127. 206. 290.
302, 304, 322, 333, 337. 353. 367. 382.
412, 420, 427. 428, 430. 431; transcen-
dental. 62
Simmel, Georg, 8
Simulacrum, 24
Sinclair, Isaak von, 194
Smith, Adam. 127. 138.328
Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. 147
Speech act. xiv. xxi, 73, 82, 175, 176. 178.
221. 353. 371, 387, 392-402, 427
Spengler, Oskar, 324, 325, 394
Spinoza, Baruch. 13, 30, 351
Stalin. Joseph, 342
Steinthal. Heymann, 22
Sletter, Christian. 440
Structuralism, xiv. xxiv, xxx-xxxiv, 4, 9-86.
94. 106, 120, 141, 142, 164. 172-74, 180.
184. 239, 240. 243, 288, 315, 317. 326,
351,439
Structure: structurality of, 260, 285
Subject, xf., xxviiif.. xxx. 55. 92. 103. 112.
126. 136, 137. 146, 164. 199. 200. 204,
207. 287. 294, 309, 336. 338, 348, 355,
356. 417. 418. 430. 439; decentered, xi,
xviii, xxxi, 6, 300. 312; imaginary. 292.
300. 306; narcissistic. 292. 306; philoso-
phy of. 214; specular. 292; theory of.
xxxiv. 54. 94. 188. 192, 202, 206, 212.
215. 255, 308. 316, 329. 386, 411; true.
205, 209. 292. 296. 299, 300, 304, 306,
309, 310, 316. 331. 372. 373. 378. 431
Subjectivity, xf., xx. xxix, 51. 96. 110, 130,
135. 136, 150, 160, 171. 186, 189, 191,
202. 204, 230. 247. 248. 279. 286. 288.
289. 293, 304, 309, 311. 316, 326, 331,
343, 346. 353. 359. 387. 408. 415. 419..
421. 424, 430
Systems theory, xiii, xxiii, 10, 33, 79-81, 86
Taxonomy. 76, 114
Theunissen, Michael, xiii
Theweleil, Klaus, 324
Thomas Aquinas. Saint. 362
Thomism, 21
Tieck, Ludwig, 330
Todorov. Tzvetan, 21. 443
Troubetzkoy. Nikolai. 34. 35. 52
Thrownness, 88
Tugendhat. Ernst, xix-xxi. 215-21, 223. 229.
239
UncontrollabUity, 286
Undecidabflity, xl. 26
Understanding, xxv-xliv, 99, 111. 209, 363,
437, 438, 444. 445
Diego, 122, 145
Vico, Gianbauista, xii
Volosbinov, Valentin N., 443
Wahl, Franois. 121. 126
Weber, Max, xxxvi. 326
Weber. Samuel. 72
Whitehead, Alfred North, 444
Will to power. 60. 82. 181. 183-85, 200,
204, 205, 321. 393
Wittgenstein. Ludwig. 5. 82. 84. 100,
211-13. 217. 221. 237, 239. 255. 257.
287, 358, 387-90. 392. 406
Wolff, Christian, 124
Wordsworth. William. 324
Theory and History of Literature
Volume 18.
Volume 17.
Volume 16.
Volume 15.
Volume 14.
Volume 13.
Volume 12.
Volume 11.
Volume 10.
Volume 9.
Volume 8.
Volume 7.
Volume 5.
Volume 4.
Volume 3.
Volume 2.
Volume 1.
Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Be-
holder
Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renais-
sance Drama
Michel de Certeau Heterologies
Jacques Attali iVoi.se
Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays
Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings. 1927-1939
Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the
Power of Fiction
Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive
Encounters with the New French Thought
Jean-Franois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge
Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Con-
temporary Criticism 2nd d., rev.
Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The
Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Her-
meneutics
Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics